Is Orientalism Islamic?

Concluding What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed defines Islam as “meaning-making for the self in terms of hermeneutical engagement with Revelation to Muhammad.”¹ Something is therefore Islamic “to the extent that it is made meaningful in terms of hermeneutical engagement.” Revelation, Ahmed argues, is not reducible to “Text” but constitutes a reality that exceeds textuality both as “Pre-text” and as “Con-text” (405). Since many orientalists also make Revelation to Muhammad meaningful in terms of hermeneutical engagement, does it mean that orientalism should therefore be deemed “Islamic”? By raising this polemical question, this essay argues that if Islam is reduced to hermeneutical engagement, orientalism becomes problematically included within the Islamic tradition. I will thus argue that the definition of Islam formulated by Ahmed makes us incapable of distinguishing between orientalist definitions of Islam and the Islamic definitions of Islam that are articulated by Muslims themselves in the argumentative spaces of their tradition.

In asking whether orientalism is Islamic, I do not wish to provide any positive answer to this question but to examine the dialectical paradoxes that stem from Ahmed’s definition. This question cannot be ignored, in my view, when one is to address the very act of defining Islam in a book that is not written for Muslims but mainly for Western-based scholars. What I want to suggest is that it might not be possible to construct any “post-orientalist” definition of Islam without enacting a sustained critique of orientalism. Because most theorists mistakenly tend to assume that such a critique has been exhausted by Edward W. Said’s book,² this necessary interdependence between construction and critique is too often overlooked. While writing about Islam in the allegedly post-orientalist space of Western academia, we might be more confined by the limitations of existing critiques of orientalism than we think.³

When Ernest Renan famously defined Islamic philosophy as “heretical” and non-Islamic, he certainly was not formulating the kind of critical argument that Al-Ghazali was making against Islamic philosophers. My argument is not only that because of its generality Ahmed’s definition of Islam fails to make sense of this crucial difference by confusing orientalist and Islamic definitions of “orthodoxy.” It is also that such a failure is symptomatically interesting, for it indirectly makes something of orientalism manifest and visible, something that the legacy of Said and post-colonialism tends to obscure. As I wish to demonstrate, it allows us to reexamine orientalism differently by deepening its critique through the following questions: Is Renan a failed Ghazali? Is the orientalist a pseudo-Islamic theologian presupposing definitions of Islamic “orthodoxy” and “heresy” while claiming a secular neutrality? Hence, is Islamophobia a repressed desire to convert to Islam displaying itself as a fear of an Islamic invasion? Indeed, one could ask provocatively: if orientalism and liberal democracies are secular and non-Islamic, where does their obsessive need to talk about and decipher the “essence of Islam” come from?

In the conclusion of this essay, I will also raise a set of philosophical questions: Is a concept of Islam reducible to a definition of what Islam is? Can one define Islam without defining its essence, and, if so, can a definition of Islam be articulated outside the Islamic tradition itself? This essay thus questions whether it is possible to think about Islam without defining its alleged essence, as it is often assumed in the Aristotelian tradition. I will argue that this question belongs to the practice of philosophy, or falsafa. Instead of trying to define Islam as an object of study within the secular disciplines of Western academia, I suggest that one might have to challenge the philosophical assumptions of modern anthropological knowledge before the reality of Islam can be conceptualized. For this reason, I do not wish to defend any preexisting anthropology of Islam defined as a discursive tradition against Ahmed’s definition. Instead, I want to suggest that “thinking Islam” might require that we think differently.

A Question of Realism

The reality of Islam seems to be vindicated by the unity of an idea that Muslims do share around the world. Because disagreements...