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Introduction

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Like so many other authors, my researching and writing this book was inspired and motivated by an experience that had a profound effect on me. In 2008 I was in Stockholm, Sweden, staying in a small student apartment in the south of the city. It soon became clear to me that if I wanted to have something close to an authentic Swedish experience, then I needed to speak and understand some of the Swedish language. So I enrolled in a beginner-level Swedish language course, two classes a week. The classes had few students, and they were relaxed and enjoyable. The most interesting aspect of this experience was the friendships I made with other students while talking during coffee breaks and after class. It was a chance encounter with one young man in particular that would forever change how I would understand the world and which would inspire the years of researching and writing this book.

My new friend was from Palestine. We got to know each other during lunch and coffee breaks, and each week we shared more about life in our home countries. His story was particularly interesting because it gave me an insight into what it was like for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. He told me about how the Israel Defense Forces had forcibly removed him and his family from their homes, and with no place to live, they fled to a Jordanian refugee camp. He lived in the camp for a few years until his application for asylum was eventually accepted by the Swedish government.

With the help of the Swedish refugee services, he was resettled in Kiruna, one of Sweden’s most northern, darkest, and coldest cities. The small city is located north of the Arctic Circle, meaning it experiences both the midnight sun and the polar night throughout the year. Even for Swedes, Kiruna is especially cold, and it could not be any more different to the parched Palestinian landscape. Following the end of his employment in a factory, my new friend moved to suburban Stockholm where he lived with three other Middle Eastern refugees. Unable to speak Swedish fluently, he wanted to both communicate with the people of his adopted nation and have better employment opportunities. This inspired him to join the Swedish language class.

Up until this point in time I had never shown great interest in the situation in Palestine. When I thought about the ongoing conflict, far away from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, where I grew up, all I could recount was the narrative that tended to dominate the Western media: the Palestinians were by and large terrorists whose desire to violently attack Israelis was in part motivated by their radical Islamic beliefs. While we hear a lot more stories now about the dire situation in places like the West Bank and Gaza, my thoughts about the ongoing conflict were dominated by media reports about what they referred to as pro-Palestinian terrorist groups.

This narrative was however completely contradicted by what my new Palestinian friend was telling me. He was neither a terrorist nor a hater of Jews. He abhorred violence and did not want retribution against those responsible for displacing him, his family, his friends, and neighbors from their land. He wanted to spend his time doing what he loved—playing soccer, drinking coffee, and smoking. He called smoking his dirty habit, which he began during his time in the refugee camp to help him relieve stress, suppress his hunger, and pass the time. Like most people he also dreamed of falling in love and having a family. Most importantly, my conversations with him revealed to me another viewpoint about the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The stories I was told by the mass media about the conflict simply did not match up with what this man was describing, so I went online, searching for alternative news sites. The more I read, the more I became aware of the many competing narratives and categories writers were using when representing the alleged terrorist threat posed by Palestinians. One of the categories used by some writers that piqued my interest was something they were calling Wahhabism.

More research helped reveal to me that this was a term that became increasingly popular among Western scholars and commentators following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Prior to these attacks few Western scholars and commentators wrote about this phenomenon, and of those who did it was usually in relation to the role it played in the forming of the modern Saudi state. Articles about Wahhabism rarely appeared in popular US newspapers and magazines, and it was largely ignored by the plethora of US-based think tanks and foreign policy organizations now churning out documents about this primarily religious phenomenon. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a turning point, as commentators began using the term when describing the influence it supposedly had on the Saudi Arabian hijackers. Furthermore, Western scholars and commentators began linking this Saudi state-sanctioned religion to Islamic radicalism and violent extremism throughout the world. The more reading I did, the less convinced I was of the apparent relationship between Wahhabism and Palestinian violence, which many US-based right-wing, conservative, and pro-Israeli commentators were claiming. My Palestinian friend had certainly never used the term. That experience planted a seed that has since grown to become this book.

This book is my modest attempt at understanding how the phenomenon Wahhabism has been represented by authors writing in a post–9/11 world characterized by anxiety about terrorism between and inside states. I am particularly concerned with how intellectuals belonging to the liberal and neoconservative traditions represent Wahhabism, and the different truth claims they rely on to support these representations. This book is also designed to understand some of the ways in which different ethical, political, and religious motivations are informing these representations.

I have set out a number of questions to help focus my book. They are: How have scholars represented Wahhabism? What kinds of problems are there with these interpretative exercises? What kinds of problems can we find in the sociology of intellectuals that warrant this kind of enquiry? How do liberal and neoconservative intellectuals in particular represent Wahhabism? And how are we to understand and make sense of these representations?

At this point it is important to briefly set out why I am focusing on representations of Wahhabism and not what is referred to as Wahhabism. There are numerous considerations that are shaping my inquiry. Though this proposition needs and gets some more elaboration later in the book, I want to highlight the basic difficulty of engaging with Wahhabism itself. There are good grounds for doubting that the phenomenon of Wahhabism has some natural or objective reality that can be immediately grasped as if it were a physical object. While we cannot see, feel, or touch the different social and intellectual processes constituting Wahhabism, we can examine its various representations. Additionally, it is hard to study a phenomenon in the social world for which we do not have a standard or widely agreed upon conceptualization or definition. Wahhabism, as I explain, is a contested category.

Let me start here with the proposition that Wahhabism does not have a natural or objective reality. This view owes a good deal to the critique of a long-standing tradition running through the history of Western philosophy after Aristotle and Augustine that treated language and its categories as if they were labels easily applied to real things. This view holds that a real thing exists in some external reality and corresponds with the concept in human thought to which the linguistic word refers. This tradition was subverted by what we can refer to as the linguistic turn, which is associated with philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, and with the deconstructionist turn announced by Ferdinand de Saussure and later by Jacques Derrida. Critiquing this tradition, Saussure explains that this approach

assumes that ideas already exist independently of words; it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature. . . . [F]inally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation—an assumption that is anything but true. But this rather naive approach can bring us near the truth by showing us that the linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms.¹

It was Saussure who pointed out that it is impossible for definitions of concepts to exist independently of or outside a specific language system. Concepts like Wahhabism cannot exist without humans naming and attaching meaning to it. Authors like Gustav Bergmann have built on these ideas, emphasizing the key role language plays in constituting the representations of reality that we can then work with.² This is why my book focuses on representations, and because they are a major focal point, it matters that we have an understanding of what I mean when speaking about representations of Wahhabism and how they work.

The term ‘representation’ means ‘to bring to mind by description’ and ‘to symbolize, serve as a sign or symbol of, serve as the type or embodiment of.’ It comes from Old French representer meaning ‘present, show, portray’ and from the Latin term repraesentare meaning ‘make present, set in view, show, exhibit, display.’ We can trace the study of representations to classical Greece when Plato and Aristotle considered literature to be an important form of representation. In fact, Aristotle believed the arts to be valuable forms of representation, seeing them as a distinctly human activity. According to Aristotle, “From childhood, men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals, that he is far more imitative and learns his lessons by representing things.”³

Since then, representations have been the focus of study for modern philosophers like Ernst Cassirer.⁴ These studies have tended to understand man to be homo symbolicum, or a representational animal, treating him as a creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs, which are understood as things that stand for or take the place of something else.⁵ As I will detail later, representations are also important elements of political theory. Political theorists have focused on them since at least the eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke sought to deal with the reccurring question about the relation between aesthetic or semiotic representation (things that stand for other things) and political representation (people who act for others).⁶

W.J.T. Mitchell offers a useful way of thinking about representations. He says we should think of a representation as a triangular relation of something or someone, by something or someone, and to someone. It is only the third part that must be a person. In light of this, Wahhabism can be understood as a representation of something, by an author and to an audience. Aristotle wrote that representations differ from one another according to object, manner, and means.⁷ The object is that which is represented, the manner is the way in which it is represented, and the means is the material used. In this study the object is Wahhabism, the manner is the ways in which intellectuals use language to represent it, and the document, for example, the newspaper article, magazine story, or online publication, is the means.

Authors are also able to use language in different ways to help achieve their desired outcomes. They can use particular rhetorical techniques like analogies, metaphorical language, similes, and neologisms. They can also construct violent accounts in such ways that help persuade the reader to either condemn or condone particular acts of violence. Another focus of this book is understanding how intellectuals use these particular rhetorical techniques to help achieve their intended aims.

It is also important that we have a deeper understanding of the relation between the representational material and that which it represents. Semioticians typically differentiate between three kinds of representational relationships: icon, symbol, and index.⁸ It is the symbolic representation that is pertinent to this book. Symbols tend to be based on arbitrary stipulation rather than their resemblance to the thing signified. Authors representing Wahhabism use text to stand in for what they believe Wahhabism to be, and then many of us as (uncritical) readers agree to regard it in this way. Representation in language is symbolic in that letters, words, and texts can represent states of affairs without actually resembling the situation. We are, as Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out, simply playing language games.⁹

Ian Hacking is among the authors to have raised some important questions when it comes to studying representations.¹⁰ He encourages us to consider whether we are explicitly or implicitly denying the existence of the natural world and if we are ignoring the possibility that some representations of the world are better than others. When I say that Wahhabism is an observer-dependent phenomenon represented by an author to an audience, what I mean is that the experience of Wahhabism in the social world comes into existence when categories are created for it, and these categories are shaped by authors with differing prejudices operating in different social and cultural contexts. As we will see, the variability in representations of Wahhabism across time and space (between intellectuals belonging to different traditions) helps illustrate this. Pursuing this line of reasoning provides for powerful insights into the cultural fabric pertaining to the construction of Wahhabism.

It is important that I state that I am neither denying that an observer-independent reality exists in the natural world nor am I asserting that everything is socially constructed. In terms of my ontological and epistemological approach I accept that a reality does exist and my interest is in how people make sense of it. My work does not decide which representations of Wahhabism are more truthful or better; rather I offer a critique of the different truth claims authors rely on when representing Wahhabism. Just as is the case with Hacking’s work on ‘making up people,’ in which he argues that creating classifications like ‘fugue’ creates new ways to be a person, the ideas motivating my study of representations are that authors’ conceptions of the phenomenon of Wahhabism shape both the ways in which we respond to it and treat the people and groups we ascribe as belonging to it.¹¹

Representations have indeed been the source of much scholarly debate, especially in the field of literature, and have drawn the attention of preeminent thinkers like Plato. He accepted the common view that literature is a representation of life and for that reason he believed it should be banished from the state. He understood representations as substitutes for the things themselves or, even more worryingly, as false or illusory substitutes having the ability to inspire antisocial emotions among people.¹² The only representations allowed to exist in Plato’s republic of rational virtue were those carefully picked and controlled by the state.¹³ If we look at the situation in the world today we can see that many states think and act in the same way; however, the emergence of new social media continues to challenge this control.

Wahhabism means very different things to different people, which is a point that has been accepted by some better studies and which will become clearer throughout this book.¹⁴ Wahhabism is in effect a deeply contested category, and I now want to introduce the reader to this contest that is taking place.

Wahhabism: A Contested Category

Wahhabism is conventionally and popularly understood to be a conservative version of Islam originating in Saudi Arabia, where it has a substantial following.¹⁵ Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab is considered to be the founder of this tradition, which played a decisive role in creating the modern Saudi state in 1932.¹⁶ The widely accepted story as recounted by Western commentators in particular is that Abd al-Wahhab, a scholar from the Najd region in what is now Saudi Arabia, was intent on promoting his understanding of monotheism to a self-identifying Muslim populace he believed to be polytheists worshiping a corrupted version of Islam.¹⁷ Born somewhere between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Abd al-Wahhab is said to have traveled to Muslim lands beyond his native Najd in the early 1800s, where he witnessed what he understood to be a laxity of conduct with regards to the practice of Islam.¹⁸ W.F. Smalley noted that Abd al-Wahhab “returned home, a prophet with a message . . . that the world had gone mad. It had become polytheistic. . . . Islam had wandered far from the principals of Mohammed.”¹⁹ It is said that Abd al-Wahhab was particularly incensed by Muslims using the rosary, dressing in expensive attire, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, visiting shrines of dead Muslims, and debating the nature of God.²⁰

Returning to his homeland a few years later with the aim of reforming Islam as it was practiced in the Najd region, Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas made him unwelcome in his home city and he fled to the nearby city of Deraiyah, where he teamed up with a local leader, Muhammad Ibn Saud (from the now (in)famous Sa‘ud family), who had his own political ambitions. The deal between the two, recounted by many Western scholars, was that they would unite the warring towns, villages, and tribes in the region under a government where Abd al-Wahhab could enforce his strict interpretation of Islam and Ibn Saud would be appointed the political ruler.²¹

Ultimately they were able to achieve their desire for religious and political control through both ideological subversion and military might, the latter supplied by fierce local Bedouin warriors commonly referred to as the Ikhwan.²² While their rebellion against the Ottoman rule in Arabia was put down in 1818, the Wahhabi rebellions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ultimately proved successful in uniting the tribes of Najd and forming what would become the modern Saudi state.²³ It is said that the Ikhwan were seduced by this new religious identity they believed would allow the Bedouin in the region to unite and fight under the common banner of Islam, rather than continually fighting each other.²⁴ Their violent energies were channeled away from killing each other and instead focused on people in neighboring lands who did not share the religious vision promoted by Abd al-Wahhab. Joseph Kostiner explains that “according to the typical portrait, the Ikhwan were bold fighters, fanatical and absolutely devoted to their country and to the spread of Wahhabi tenets.”²⁵ The modern Saudi state is therefore considered to be a fusing between the religious beliefs of an ideologue, a leader wanting to exert his control over a people, and a group of warriors inspired by both.

Today Wahhabism is generally described as a relatively small but very influential branch within Islam in general and Sunni Islam in particular, advocating a return to what its proponents claim to be the true principles of Islam.²⁶ Wahhabism is often identified for its ongoing efforts to purify what is seen as the modern, corrupted version of Islam, with the movement advocating for a return to basic principles, rules, and teachings of the version of Islam that existed during the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the first three generations of Muslims (often referred to as the pious ancestors, or the salaf).²⁷

The doctrine of monotheism (tawhid) is widely considered to be the hallmark of both Abd al-Wahhab’s teaching and the Wahhabi movement he inspired.²⁸ Proponents of Wahhabism are said to believe that a failure to adhere to and uphold tawhid is the key reason for a collapsing in social order, tyranny, corruption, oppression, injustice, and degeneration.²⁹ Proponents of Wahhabism are therefore widely known for condemning any practices or activities violating or that could violate this belief.³⁰ Commentators often remark that Wahhabism holds that dedication to tawhid must be absolute and any kind of worship or veneration of objects, or superstitious, animist, or other kinds of religious worship, are not tolerated.³¹ It is said that other interpretations of Islam like Sufism, Shi‘ism, and other versions of Sunni Islam are viewed by proponents of Wahhabism to be as unacceptable as the non-Islamic religions. Wahhabism’s puritanical and iconoclastic philosophies are often blamed for its conflict with other Muslim groups.³²

Here it is also worthwhile to have a basic understanding of how scholars have distinguished between the different versions of Sunni Islam. Wahhabism is commonly understood by those studying the evolution of the movement to have derived from an offshoot of the Hanbali school of law, considered to be the most conservative and smallest in terms of followers of the four schools of Islamic thought/religious jurisprudence (also called madhhab in Arabic) within Sunni Islam (the others are Shafi‘i, Hanafi, and Maliki).³³ The Hanbali school largely derives its religious law (known as sharia law) from the Qur’an, the Hadith (the words and customs of the Prophet), and the views of the Prophet’s companions (known as the sahaba). Unlike the Hanafi and Maliki schools, the Hanbali school does not accept community customs or jurist discretion as a basis for Islamic law in the absence of the Qur’an’s and the Hadith’s failure to provide clear answers to arising issues. Wahhabism’s unwavering commitment to the basic principles, rules, and teachings of the version of Islam practiced during the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the salaf is the major reason why it is typically considered the most austere version of Sunni Islam.³⁴

Followers of Wahhabism are, however, likely to reject the categorization as an offshoot of the Hanbali school, which views (what outsiders would call) Muslims as belonging to one of two groups: followers of the salaf or followers of the khalaf (those who come after the salaf), the latter of which are not typically considered by followers of Wahhabism to be real Muslims.³⁵ Some commentators have suggested that those following the way of the salaf will often label themselves as Salafis, while many outsiders, particularly those wanting to denigrate the movement, will insultingly label them as followers of Wahhabism.³⁶ The term Wahhabism is considered by some to be derogatory because of its suggesting that these Muslims are followers of the scholar Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Wahhabism as enforced by the Saudi Arabian state, as opposed to followers of the salaf. My choosing to use the term Wahhabism in this book is for practical reasons. It is how most laypeople identify this tradition and is the term used by the overwhelming majority of writers, commentators, and scholars, particularly those in the West. I am aware of the negative associations often attached to the term and can only hope that readers, particularly those within Saudi Arabia, understand there is no malicious intent inspiring and motivating my use of the term.

Modern Saudi Arabian society is widely understood to be the quintessential society ordered according to Wahhabi religious doctrine.³⁷ Wahhabism is typically seen as providing the theological basis for modern Saudi societal practices such as gender segregation, prohibition of alcohol, and the ban on women from driving.³⁸ Wahhabism is not, however, said to be confined to Saudi Arabia, with Western commentators in particular often writing about the different states and groups of people promoting this belief system.³⁹ Outside of Saudi Arabia, Qatar is the country most often described as enforcing Wahhabi religious doctrine, often attributed to the Saudi royal family’s ongoing support for Qatar’s ruling al-Thani family since the nineteenth century.⁴⁰ Outsiders however tend to view the Wahhabism enforced by the Qatari state as a lot less rigid than in Saudi Arabia.⁴¹

Beyond these basic understandings, Wahhabism is a heavily contested category. This quality is captured in the Wikipedia entry on the Wahhabi movement. As is so often the case with Wikipedia, the entry draws on a rich assortment of sources of varying degrees of credibility, tendentiously describing it as

a reactionary religious movement or offshoot branch of Islam variously described as “orthodox”, “ultraconservative”, “austere”, “fundamentalist”, “puritanical” (or “puritan”), an Islamic “reform movement” to restore “pure monotheistic worship”, or an “extremist movement.”⁴²

In the West, Wahhabism has been frequently singled out for attention as the source of modern Islamic terrorism. The US 9/11 Commission Report claimed that Islamist terrorism had found its inspiration in a long tradition of extreme intolerance flowing through the founders of Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and prominent Salafi thinkers.⁴³ In Europe the directorate-general for External Policies of the European Parliament issued a report in 2013 warning, “the risks posed by Salafist/Wahhabi terrorism go far beyond the geographical scope of the Muslim world. The attacks on New York, Washington D.C., London and Madrid remind us of this.” ⁴⁴

Equally, and given long-standing and close ties between a succession of US administrations and the Saudi government, it has mattered that Saudi officials have long insisted that Islam is tolerant and peaceful. They have repeatedly denied allegations that their government exports religious extremism or supports extremist political movements.⁴⁵ Likewise, careful scholarship by authors like Trevor Stanley suggest Islamic terrorism cannot be adequately explained as the export of Saudi Wahhabism, as many have claimed.⁴⁶

This contest to define Wahhabism also involves Islamic scholars living in the West. Differing representations offered by Islamic scholars like Khaled Abou El Fadl and Stephen Schwartz are a microcosm of a much larger intellectual debate taking place in a range of scholarly and intellectual forums.⁴⁷ Both these authors are inspired and motivated by different religious and political interests. El Fadl claims to represent the majority of Muslims he believes to be moderate, peace-loving, and who, like many in the West, value human rights, embrace modernity, and respect women. According to his self-proclaimed moderate Islamic approach, Wahhabism is a corrupted version of Islam existing on the lunatic fringe of the wider Islamic faith.

Schwartz is strongly motivated by a desire to promote his Sufi Islamic beliefs. Drawing on his personal experiences with Sufism in the Balkan region throughout the 1990s, Schwartz claims Sufism can provide the much-needed voice of reason at a time when radical Islamists like the Wahhabis, with the support of the Saudi state, are engaging in terrorism and violence. Like El Fadl, Schwartz understands Wahhabism to be a corrupted and perverse version of Islam; however, this is because it does not align with his own Sufi beliefs, as opposed to the modern and progressive interpretation of Islam that El Fadl claims to follow.

As both intellectuals are offering different particular Islamic views, both are clearly inspired by differing political and religious interests. It is therefore unsurprising that they also rely on different kinds of evidence to support their claims. In terms made famous by Benedict Anderson, both El Fadl and Schwartz are constructing slightly different Imagined communities.⁴⁸ These differences in approach and reasoning only increase as we consider other scholarly representations of Wahhabism.

The Role of Intellectuals

There are important reasons why we should pay close attention to the work of intellectuals in general and the way intellectuals represent Wahhabism in particular. The long and rich scholarly tradition known as the sociology of intellectuals acknowledges that it matters what intellectuals are saying and writing.⁴⁹ Intellectuals writing in newspapers, scholarly journals, online, and in magazines produce a lot of what we think we know and understand to be Wahhabism. Many scholars have acknowledged it is these intellectuals who are producing knowledge in the social world in the form of representations that are informing our judgments and decisions, particularly with regards to foreign policy.⁵⁰ If we want to understand and make sense of some of the information influencing the modern political debate and policy- and decision-making processes regarding Wahhabism, then we must pay some attention to the ways in which intellectuals are representing this phenomenon.

The contest to define Wahhabism involves intellectuals, commentators, and polemicists from different intellectual and political traditions and frameworks, using different rhetorical techniques, making different claims to truth, and motivated by different ethical, political, and religious considerations. The sites of this contest are numerous and include the scholarly literature, mass media publications like newspapers and magazine articles, and the blogosphere as well. The significance of this intellectual battle becomes readily apparent when we consider the effects intellectuals’ representations of a phenomenon like Wahhabism can have on politicians, public opinion, and policymaking, particularly when these are occurring in a political and social context characterized by heightened anxiety about Islamic terrorism.

We currently have a situation where a rise in spin has been accompanied by an increased demand on the part of policymakers and governments that are increasingly reliant on evidence when making policy.⁵¹ Both the use of spin and the appeal to evidence rely on Enlightenment assumptions and approaches to securing the conditions of truth: public administrators rely on the rigorous collection of evidence to evaluate their legislative programs and policies, while governments rely on the scientific study of the effects of public relations campaigns.⁵²

This conjunction has meant that since 2001 we have seen many Western governments rely on the creative presentation of facts or spin as evidence to manipulate public opinion and mobilize support for policies, particularly those involving military invasions of sovereign nations like Afghanistan and Iraq and supporting security and intelligence-gathering measures aimed at protecting Western interests from Islamic terrorism. Certain Western governments intent on pursuing their own political aims and goals have proven to be disingenuous and deceptive and have manipulated and fabricated facts to support their policies. The quintessential example is the intelligence failure inspiring the US-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The US and British governments claimed to have evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the security of the West.⁵³ We now know this was not the case. The result is that we currently have a situation Hannah Arendt first commented on when writing about the politics of the Cold War in the 1960s, in which even factual truths have become open to manipulation.⁵⁴

What is interesting to me and what helps animate and legitimate this book is the role Western intellectuals representing Wahhabism are playing in the modern political context. I am especially interested in their roles as representatives of particular interest groups keen to promote their beliefs and values. I share this interest with many prominent scholars who have dedicated a lot of time and energy to making sense of the role of intellectuals in the modern political context. This has become known as the sociology of intellectuals tradition.

This tradition began with groundbreaking work done by Karl Mannheim.⁵⁵ We have since seen an evolving tradition of inquiry and debate between intellectuals as diverse as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, J.P. Nettl, Peter Berger, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Michael Walzer, and Edward Said, all of whom have attempted to say what defines an intellectual and offered guidance on how we are to best understand their social significance.⁵⁶ Some of these writers like Foucault and Said have understood intellectuals as living on the margins or even outside of society, a circumstance warranted by their eternal pursuit of truth and of speaking truth to power.⁵⁷ Others like Habermas have treated intellectuals as critical to the maintenance of a public sphere and to the health of a democratic order.⁵⁸ There are also scholars like Gramsci who treat intellectuals as social animals bound to interest groups that use various ideological apparatuses like the media to help impose and legitimate particular values and beliefs on a society.⁵⁹ The debates about the role of intellectuals that I reprise at length in the next chapter help shape some of the issues I explore in the book.

The public sphere is also an important concept I refer to numerous times and warrants closer attention. The representations of Wahhabism provided by the intellectuals studied in this book appear in places like mainstream American newspapers, magazines, books, and online. We can categorize these different mediums as belonging to what we call a public sphere. Often when we think about the nature of the public sphere, we think of a community or public acting in a particular space. It is sometimes assumed civil dialogue flourishes in this kind of setting so long as it is free from domination and exclusion. This kind of approach however fails to recognize that communication in public rarely involves widespread and equal participation. We must appreciate the fragmented nature of these spaces, in which there are few who receive attention and many who give it. We must also understand that these spaces are largely comprised of audiences that are generally watching, reading, or observing what is happening.

Jürgen Habermas is often credited as providing the quintessential notion of the public sphere.⁶⁰ Habermas conceptualizes a public sphere as a place in which critical debate takes place and lists a number of conditions that must be met in order for a space to be categorized as a public sphere: there must be the ability to form a public opinion; all citizens must be granted access; citizens must be free of political and economic controls, therefore allowing them to speak about matters of general interest; and there must be debate about the general rules governing relations. Habermas’s normative account has been extremely influential and is an interesting philosophical idea; however, there are more pragmatic conceptualizations like the one offered by Ari Adut that provide a better and more useful way of understanding this concept.⁶¹

Adut’s conceptualization of the public sphere fits perfectly with how we can understand representations as working. The idea of access is integral to Adut’s conceptualization, and he describes three ways people are able to attain this. One is to be physically present in the space, for example, when people meet and talk in the street. The second has to do with representational access, meaning that one’s name, image, or words can appear in spaces like newspapers or magazines. Thirdly, we can have sensory access when the contents of the space are made available to our senses.

The term public sphere implies general access; however, the reality is quite different. Many public spaces have obstacles preventing most of us from being seen or having our opinions heard. This is especially the case when dealing with spaces that tend to receive a lot of publicity. Generally speaking, the more publicity a space receives, the harder it is to be heard or seen. Mainstream US newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are good examples, as a select few contributors are able to publicize their opinions. When dealing with spaces that receive relatively high amounts of publicity, physical access becomes very hard and representational access is highly valued. Nearly anyone can submit an opinion piece to these newspapers, but very few will ever have their articles printed.

Conversely, forums on websites that encourage inclusivity like 4chan provide examples of spaces that receive relatively less publicity but are easier for people to access. Despite this, few would deny that newspapers like the New York Times form an important part of what we conceptualize as the public sphere. As a space it does not grant general access but it does provide many with sensory access. The public sphere as conceptualized by Adut is thus a generic term denoting all virtual or real spaces, the contents of which obtain general visibility or audibility. Key here is the term ‘virtual,’ which points to the important role played by online platforms. The internet as the new public sphere or as a key part of the public sphere continues to be a focus of much scholarly enquiry as more users go online to get information.⁶² The integral role played by social media in the recent Arab Spring shows just how important the online world has become.

At this point it is also necessary to clarify whom we categorize as an intellectual and explain the basis for these claims. There has been and continues to be a lot of discussion about who is and who is not an intellectual. As we see with authors like Gramsci, Mannheim, Foucault, and Said, the conceptualizing of who or what is an intellectual is often tied to the role and responsibilities these authors believe intellectuals should adopt and adhere to. We are wise to reject the narrow and arguably prescriptive conception of the intellectual offered by authors like Said and Foucault, where the intellectual is someone existing on the margins of society.⁶³ More apt is the inclusive approach like that promoted by Gramsci. In this book, an intellectual is understood to be anyone who uses ideological apparatuses like the print and mass media and digital technologies to produce and disseminate representations of Wahhabism.

Whereas those adopting a more narrow definition of the intellectual may distinguish between a commentator, understood as someone who expresses a written opinion on a subject in the public sphere, and an intellectual, a relatively more inclusive approach means a commentator is treated as an intellectual. While Gramsci’s ideas are hugely influential, it should be noted that the conceptualization of the intellectual used in this book is not Marxist, in that there is no reliance on any determinist assumptions about the work of the intellectual in relation to their class origins or affiliation. We can however associate our understanding of an intellectual to a particular group, including those writers promoting liberal and neoconservative values and beliefs.

I am also interested in the broader question about the role intellectuals play in creating what Anderson calls Imagined communities and what Said calls Imagined geographies.⁶⁴ These scholars, in addition to those like Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Smith, Ronald Suny, and Michael Kennedy, are among those to recognize the important roles intellectuals play as catalysts in a variety of nationalist ideologies and movements.⁶⁵ Animating and legitimating this book is the desire to understand and make sense of the role intellectuals representing Wahhabism play in socially constructing a community that is imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group, and the way intellectuals use text to create a perception of space that has helped inspire the global war on terror. It is in this sense that intellectuals play crucial roles in shaping the politics of modern societies.

The Nature of the Political

The nature of the political is a second wider intellectual problem at stake. How we are to understand politics, including how we define it and what we think the aims and goals of politics are, has been the focus of much scholarly debate. Early twentieth-century authors like Carl Schmitt and Max Weber offered challenging accounts of the political, controverting the then-conventional liberal framework. Weber and especially Schmitt questioned why this tradition had too readily assumed the legal, rational, and ethical norms undergirding the legitimacy of liberal democracies, a position that had long been accorded a hegemonic conceptual status in the West.⁶⁶ In more recent times authors like Bernard Crick and Simon Critchley have contributed to a different kind of critique of the liberal tradition.⁶⁷ For Crick and Critchley, politics is about helping to end injustice and wrongs suffered by the Other.⁶⁸ Like these scholars, it is important to understand that intellectuals representing Wahhabism make different assumptions that influence their representations. This matters when we begin to consider the influential role these representations can play in the policymaking process.

The relation between intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism and the policy- and decision-making process is the third key intellectual problem animating and legitimating this book. Bacchi provides an important and revisionist account of policy as a product of processes that lead to a particular way of representing political or policy problems. Her work is important because it helps show how policy works, how we are governed, and how the practice of policymaking implicitly constitutes us as subjects. Bacchi highlights the integral role intellectuals play in this process as it is them who are framing, choosing to highlight or ignore, particular aspects of problems in their representations that are informing the policy-making process.⁶⁹

This raises some very important questions when we think that these intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism have the ability to influence foreign policy in an age where Western liberal governments are obsessed with the (real or imagined) threat posed by radical Islam. This circumstance requires that we ask, what are the bases for these representations? What are intellectuals choosing to emphasize and ignore, and why? What particular claims to truth are intellectuals relying on to support their assessments of the situation?

This takes me to my fourth and final problematic animating and legitimating this book, which is making sense of and dealing with the relation between truth and politics. This issue has been raised by a number of writers, including Hannah Arendt. Arendt writes that we live in an age of mass manipulation where even the status of factual truth is likely to be challenged.⁷⁰ We have, as Stephen Toulmin and John Caputo more recently pointed out, moved beyond a conception of truth framed in terms of timeless and universal propositions, without needing to give up on the idea of truth itself.⁷¹ This entails that we still find ways of dealing with different claims to truth, particularly those that are religious and political in origin or substance.

Unable to make certain assumptions about truth that would then require defending a particular view and testing the veridicity of particular representations of Wahhabism against this view, I instead deal with the role prejudice plays in truth claims. I follow Arendt’s advice and deal with the relation between truth and politics by identifying and unpacking the prejudices attached to and inspiring these truth claims.⁷² This speaks to the much larger problem of how we should treat truth claims in the political sphere, which has major implications for things like foreign policy-making.

In this book I have decided to focus on intellectuals belonging to two traditions, namely liberalism and neoconservatism. I have identified these traditions because they are among the most prominent traditions in the political theory and international relations fields and because they have arguably had the most influence on governments in the modern political world. Neoconservatives, for example, played a major role in the George W. Bush presidency (2001–08), an administration determined to both wage and lead the global war on terror project that continues to dominate the international political context.⁷³ Liberalism has long provided a large framework of political vocabulary and ideas, which have informed Western governments and international and local activists keen on transforming totalitarian Middle Eastern regimes into liberal democratic states.⁷⁴

To access the work of intellectuals from these traditions, I have chosen to analyze texts from a variety of sources, including books, journal articles, mainstream US newspapers, online magazines, and think tanks. Part of my reasoning for deciding to focus on US newspapers when analyzing texts written by neoconservatives is that neoconservatism tends to be US-centric.⁷⁵ Its effects are certainly global, especially when neoconservatives have positions of influence within the US government like they did during the George W. Bush administration; however, its intellectuals write articles primarily aimed at an American populace responsible for electing its political representatives.

There are a number of reasons why I have selected a range of articles appearing in scholarly literature, newspapers, online magazines, and from think tanks. First, these different forms can be conceptualized as providing key parts of what we can call a public sphere. This means that they are sites where information can be translated from an intellectual to a wider audience. For example, large numbers of people read newspaper articles written by liberal and neoconservative intellectuals appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Post, and USA Today.⁷⁶

I have also chosen to include some lesser-known and less popular sources. Sometimes this has been a deliberate choice and other times it has been a necessity. An example of the former is my decision to include an analysis of neoconservative intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism appearing in the online magazine The Weekly Standard. This publication is widely regarded as one of the most prominent neoconservative publications.

At this point I should also talk about some of the major theories and frameworks influencing my work. I have drawn on the dialectical tradition Bertell Ollman has done a lot to resurrect and clarify.⁷⁷ This tradition, as Ollman and Smith argue, is a way of thinking about and using a set of categories that captures the real changes and interactions happening in the social world. It offers a way of investigating social reality and presenting what we find to others. A dialectical imagination encourages us to think less about things and more about relations and processes that are constantly affecting one another. It emphasizes the evolving nature of things and the relational nature of the social world. This approach has two key elements that are influencing my work, namely a philosophy of internal relations and a process of abstraction.⁷⁸

To help show how this process of abstraction works, I will highlight the major role played by several important elements in constituting representations of Wahhabism. These elements are what Gerald Holton calls themata and what Kurt Danziger calls generative metaphors.⁷⁹ Holton defines themata as those presuppositions that often exist for long periods of history and which are not derivable “from either observation or analytic ratiocination.”⁸⁰ Danziger describes generative metaphors as metaphorical descriptions that have been used over long periods of time and which have come to be thought of “as expressing some kind of literal truth.”⁸¹ I will describe both of these in greater detail later. At this point I want to point out that my ability to make sense of liberal and neoconservative representations of Wahhabism relies in part on my ability to abstract the roles both of these processes play when considering how intellectuals make sense of the world and the representing process.

This dialectical framing is particularly congruent with a critical discourse analysis approach I draw on when analyzing some of the different rhetorical techniques employed by liberal and neoconservative intellectuals. Since foundational work by key figures like Ruth Wodak, Norman Fairclough, and Clive Holes, this kind of approach has helped us to focus on the different ways social and political domination are reproduced in text and talk.⁸² As a result of this work critical discourse analysis has become a well-known interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse as a social practice and seems especially appropriate when engaging the work of intellectuals, whose practice is essentially discursive in nature. That critical discourse analysts treat language as a social practice means it is especially helpful in highlighting the dialectical nature of language as a constitutive medium that is made in and makes the world. This approach appreciates in particular the relational character of power and the often opaque nature of the relations between discourse and society. It also recognizes that these relations play integral roles in securing the interests of those in power.

Intellectuals have a plethora of rhetorical techniques available to them when constructing their representations of Wahhabism. Generally speaking, the more skilled and versed intellectuals are in applying their trade, the more rhetorical techniques they will have in their arsenal and the more complex their rhetorical techniques will be. All research faces limitations, and one of those I have encountered is that I am not able to analyze all of the different rhetorical techniques employed by intellectuals. Such a task would likely result in thousands of pages of textual analysis that would no doubt bore readers. I have chosen to focus on five specific elements of discourse, namely metaphors, similes, analogies, neologisms, and the structuring of accounts of violence. The general case for focusing on metaphors, similes, and analogies as crucial elements of discursive practice has been made by George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson in a series of groundbreaking works, and more recently by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander.⁸³ Philosophers like Mary Midgley have also acknowledged the way these central features of language are integral to the mythmaking process.⁸⁴

I have chosen to focus on neologisms primarily because many neoconservative intellectuals have chosen to deploy them when representing the apparent threat posed by Wahhabism. I think of how prominent neoconservative intellectuals like Frank Gaffney Jr., who uses the neologisms “Islamofascist” and “Islamofascism” when representing the apparent threat posed by Wahhabism.⁸⁵ I have also adapted Karen Cerulo’s cognitive approach to establishing the ways the architecture of narratives of violence work to mobilize a range of ethical and emotional responses on the part of readers.⁸⁶ This is valuable because it allows me to abstract and make sense of intellectuals’ claims relating Wahhabism to violence. The fact that Wahhabism received very little, if any, attention from Western scholars pre-9/11 and pre-global war on terror suggests its relation to violence is significant to some of the intellectuals representing it in the modern political context. Focusing on the structuring of violent accounts also helps to reveal some of the more subtle rhetorical techniques writers use in their attempts to persuade their audience. While many readers may have an understanding of what metaphors, similes, and analogies are and how they work, very few may be aware of the cognitive structuring of violent accounts.

Finally, I want to outline the structure of the argument in the book. In Chapter One I provide a cursory review of some of the scholarly literature dedicated to Wahhabism, teasing out some of the dilemmas that inspired this book. This involves looking at some of the truth claims scholars rely on when representing Wahhabism, examining how some scholars construct Imagined communities and Imagined geographies, and dealing with the problem of translation.

In Chapter Two I take a more concentrated look at the role of the intellectual. This involves taking a close look at the sociology of intellectuals tradition and establishing some of the key issues it has set loose. I also talk about making sense of truth, which helps us to deal with the different truth claims intellectuals rely on when representing Wahhabism, and the key role prejudice plays in influencing how we make sense of the social world.

In Chapter Three I describe some of the key theories influencing how I go about deconstructing and making sense of liberal and neoconservative intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism. I describe the dialectical imagination I have adopted, what fuzzy categories are and how they work, and how I make use of Max Weber’s ideal type. I also describe the critical discourse analysis approach I have adopted and the epistemological assumptions it carries with it.

In Chapter Four I begin the interpretative and analytic process and deal with how liberal intellectuals have gone about representing Wahhabism. In Chapter Five I describe what generative metaphors and themata are and how they work, and then make sense of the different representations of Wahhabism. In Chapter Six I continue the interpretative, analytical, and sense-making process by looking at the different ways neoconservative intellectuals have gone about representing Wahhabism. In the Conclusion I explicate and clarify the wider significance of the book, particularly in the context of the sociology of intellectuals and the policy- and decision-making processes.