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Over the past generation, the ¤elds of social movement theory and Islamic studies have followed parallel trajectories, with few glances across the chasm that has separated them. This volume helps to bridge that chasm, offering insights from Islamic movements to contribute to social movement theory, and insights from social movement theory to assist the study of Islamic movements . Parallels In the 1970s, social movement theory and Islamic studies underwent parallel paradigmatic revolutions: social movement theory shunted aside collective behavior , and Islamic studies turned against Orientalism. The previously dominant perspectives, largely unchallenged for generations, shared a variety of features in common. Both had their origins in the entry of the masses into the political calculations of Western elites. In the case of collective behavior, the era of mass democracy spurred Gustave Le Bon, Robert E. Park, and other founders of the ¤eld to examine the mysteries of the new political actors . In the case of Orientalism, the era of imperialism spurred William Jones, Ernest Renan, and other major ¤gures to explore the religion, culture, and history of the newly colonized peoples. Both ¤elds adopted similar approaches to their subjects, emphasizing the grip that social forces had over them, although these forces were inverted in the two ¤elds: the weight of tradition was said to bear down on Muslims, and the lack of tradition was said to make crowds susceptible to contagion. The subjects in both ¤elds were often treated as irrational and in need of salvation through the gaze of the (presumably rational) scholar.1 289 Conclusion Social Movement Theory and Islamic Studies Charles Kurzman Self-doubt appeared in collective behavior and Orientalism about the same time in the 1960s. Already in the 1950s, Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian, authors of the authoritative textbook on collective behavior, criticized the¤eld’s “often biased descriptions” and “the tendency to single out for study only those collective phenomena of which the observer disapproves” (1957, 12, 16)—but their goal in making these criticisms was to improve the ¤eld by making it more “scienti¤c” and “objective.” Similarly, Carl Couch (1968) urged the ¤eld to distance itself from derogatory stereotypes that littered earlier works. In Islamic studies, Anouar Abdel-Malek charged that the end of the colonial era had set Orientalism “in crisis.” The ¤eld’s institutionalization “dates essentially from the period of colonial establishment,” with academic societies founded in Batavia in 1781, Paris in 1822, London in 1834, and the United States in 1842 (Abdel-Malek 1963, 104). Orientalist scholarship was “profoundly permeated” by the state’s need “to gather intelligence information in the area to be occupied, to penetrate the consciousness of the people in order to better assure its enslavement to the European powers,” with the result that “the scienti¤c value of arduous work” was often “compromise [d]” (106). Now that the colonized regions had won their independence, Abdel-Malek concluded, Orientalism “had to be thought anew” (112; see also Hourani 1967; Issawi 1981). Similarly, A. L. Tibawi argued, “Gone are the days when Orientalists used to write largely for the bene¤t of other Orientalists .” They have a large and growing readership in the Muslim world, and in “their present mood, after repeated polemic and missionary onslaughts against their faith, and prolonged Western political and cultural domination of their lands, the Muslims are more prone to take offense than ever before” (Tibawi 1963, 191–92). These critiques were offered from within the fold, explicitly cast as attempts to improve collective behavior and Orientalism, not to dismiss them. By the 1970s, though, the ¤elds of Orientalism and collective behavior were having dif¤culty reproducing themselves. The second edition of Turner and Killian’s collective behavior textbook, published in 1972, vehemently rejected the pejorative biases in the ¤eld. At the same time, a series of works— Oberschall (1973), Gamson (1975), Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly (1975), McCarthy and Zald (1977), and Tilly (1978) being among the most in®uential—launched a direct assault on the premises of collective behavior. In Islamic studies, the 29th International Congress of Orientalists, held in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the ¤rst such meeting, voted to remove Orientalism from its name, replacing it with “Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa” (Le XXIXe Congrès 1975, 67). A series of works—Laroui (1973), Coury (1975), Naraghi (1977), el-Zein (1977), Djaït (1985), Turner (1978), Tibawi (1979), and most famously Said (1978)—rejected Orientalist premises. In the United States, Orientalism was displaced almost completely by Middle...

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