Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge by Wael B. Hallaq (review)

In Restating Orientalism, a companion piece to his Shari'a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Impossible State (Columbia University Press, 2015), Wael Hallaq has written a fascinating, tightly argued, polemical, and ultimately frustrating book. The argument: Modern knowledge and the modern academy are rooted in an epistemological shift that has separated the West from the rest of world history since the birth of the limited liability corporation in the 17th century and the concomitant emergence of Enlightenment thought (pp. 16, 36, 185). Here were the origins of individualism, an arrogance regarding the universal nature of Europe's cultural values, and the driving impulse to spread them globally that led directly to colonialism (as seen exemplarily first in the East India Company and today in Israel), the essence of which was genocide and environmental destruction (pp. 189, 220–27). Modernity, with its focus on an individual in a disenchanted world stands in stark contrast to the traditional societies that made up the rest of world history, and especially to Hallaq's main counterexample, the precolonial Muslim Middle East (pp. x, 75–77).¹ The Islamic legal system, with its independent financial basis in pious endowments (awqaf), represented a sovereign moral system independent of the ruler's authority that was not subject to the Agambian exceptionality of the nationstate, born in Europe and then spread though colonialism to the rest of the world (pp. 79–83). Bereft of the type of moral guidance that Islamic law had provided—based, instead, on an anthropocentric sovereignty—the modern state, both in its European origins and its later colonial derivatives, offered its subjects only materialism and the need to dominate the Other, packaged in a doctrine of progress (pp. 85, 101–5). Faced with this predicament, the correct course of action is to turn to a study of the spiritual richness of the traditional non-Western world and to refashion a self that has been alienated by modernity (pp. x, 240–54). And here, strikingly, is where Orientalism—understood as the study of the spiritual traditions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas—is well-placed to lead the way forward: not as the study of the Other but as a technology to learn from the Other and to repair the European self as a first step of rolling back modernity (pp. 257–67).

Hallaq's use of Edward Said's Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979) is primarily as a clarifying foil. For Hallaq, Said's text, which became so influential, did not go far enough in its criticism—it was not just the academic field of Orientalism that had played a role in justifying and implementing European colonialism, Orientalism was but one part of modern knowledge, with the social and natural sciences playing a similar role (p. 6). Said's analysis, which Hallaq acknowledges had made his own work possible, had been hampered by Said's inability to free himself from Enlightenment humanism, his focus on representation, his disinterest in the Middle East itself, his ignoring of the importance of colonialism's distortion of Islamic law, and his misreading of Michel Foucault's theory of the author (pp. 57, 61, 71, 142). Hallaq's misgivings regarding Said are clarified in his extensive discussion of the work of René Guénon, whom Hallaq uses as a favorable contrast to Said (pp. 163, 172) and whom he credits as having articulated one of the most astute critiques of modern knowledge in the 20th century (pp. 142–62). Guénon may initially be a surprising figure for Hallaq to use as a paradigm for intellectual engagement, but his inclusion in the analysis clarifies a good deal about the aim of Restating Orientalism.

Guénon was the 20th century's most important proponent of the doctrine of perennial philosophy, in which each of the world's major religious traditions is seen to possess a spiritual truth that needs to be accessed through initiation into a specific tradition...