'The question of Islam shall remain with us for many years to come. The first condition that has to be met when approaching this question is to approach it not with hate, but with intelligence.' - Michel Foucault
What do I, a Malaysian academic based and working in Berlin, conscious of the obvious advantages of education and opportunities that I possess, say to a young foreign student of a madrasah (religious seminary) in Pakistan when he turns to me and asks the following question:
"What will happen to us when we go back home? Will they arrest us and put us in jail? Will you come to help us, speak on our behalf and tell them that we didn't do anything wrong?"
And what do I say to the foreign student in the madrasah in Golok, Southern Thailand, when he asks me:
"Why do people hate us? Why are we being followed, photographed and questioned all the time? What will happen to us when we return to Indonesia? Will we go to prison for this?"
The political scientist in me - a Cartesian rationalist - murmurs a word of caution, counselling me to maintain a degree of objective distance and impartiality from the subject of my enquiry. Pointing to that remote Archimedean point outside the narrative economy, he reminds me of the need to remain beyond and above the drama played out before my eyes.
Most difficult moment
Yet the human rights activist in me - a Levinasian moralist - nudges me forward, urging me to extend a helping hand, to convey a word of sympathy and the solicited assurance that all will be well, and that should the worst come to the worst, I will be there to speak on the students' behalf.
The face-to-face encounter with the Other is perhaps the most difficult moment in any scholarly study, but it is a stage that has to be crossed nonetheless. And having done so, the scholar realises that the moment of the encounter will never leave him. Levinas was right when he noted that the face-to-face encounter with the Other obliterates that final boundary between Self and Other, and that it invariably leaves the viewer trapped though he may be within the solipsistic confines of his devouring and arresting gaze with the moral responsibility for the Other.
Recognition of the Other is what proper fieldwork is all about, but at the same time it presents a cognitive pitfall of sorts. For the gaze both distorts and re-arranges at the same time; disrupts the superficial coherence of settled assumptions; forces one to question one's own presuppositions and ultimately blurs the neat distinction between the mode of analysis and the object of enquiry itself.
These are the daily dramas that are acted out before the penetrating gaze of the wandering scholar today. More so for those of us whose discipline and field of research happens to be political Islam. It is safe to say that for many of us in the field, the months and years following the disaster of 11 September have re-launched our careers with a vengeance. For decades political Islam was seen as a discipline best left to the quiet labours of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists. Ours was a low-maintenance field that needed only a minimum of pastoral care, and where even the most novel of discoveries were celebrated over a cup of tea among a handful of fellow initiates.
All that was set to change with the Iranian revolution of 1979, a paradigmatic shift which moved the French philosopher Michel Foucault to remark that this was "a revolution of the spirit in an age where there was no spirit." The rise of political Islam and its resurgence across the Muslim world in the 1980s and 1990s provided the catalyst for renewed interest in popular normative Islam, and its political expression in particular. Scholars all over the world - this writer included -- began to study this form of religio-politics with enthusiasm.
In some cases political Islam gave birth to new, unprecedented and previously-inconceivable political institutions and configurations. In other cases the expression of this longing for a Muslim political habitus resulted in spectacular, and sometimes horrific, instances of a hybrid Modernity gone wrong. Ahmed Rashid's study on the Taliban and Darius Rejali's outstanding Foucauldian analysis of the regime of punishment and social engineering in post-revolutionary Iran come to mind.
What, then, is to be done; and how does one conduct research in the field of political Islam under the circumstances in which we are forced to labour today? Can there be such a thing as an objective approach to the question, and can we maintain a sense of critical distance from a phenomenon that cries out to be studied critically?
The method is the subject.
The wandering scholar is an itinerant figure burdened by the weight of a collective memory that grows heavier with each passing generation. Apart from his notebook, camera and laptop computer (if he can afford one), the trail of historical baggage that follows in his train of thoughts is long and cumbersome.
I belong to a generation that was weaned on a diet of Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist puritanism. Though in my heart of hearts I harbour an undeclared admiration for the works of Richard Burton, Snouk Hurgronje, Marshall Broomhall and even Wilfred Thesinger, the iron laws of political correctness dictate that such names are to be publicly uttered (if at all) only with the utmost unbridled contempt They being the pioneers of an era when scholarship walked hand-in-hand with the progress of Empire, and whose ideas and theories helped to construct the order of knowledge and power summarily described as 'Orientalism'.
By now most of us have grown acquainted with the post-structuralist and deconstructionist critiques of Orientalism that only a cursory overview and summing up of the general thesis is required here. Edward Said (1978) was the first to systematically arrange the vast array of writings and ideas of that epoch and fit them into a coherent system which, as he has demonstrated persuasively, was aimed at foregrounding a vision of the world that was essentially Eurocentric and which was designed to complement and perpetuate an order of power (underwritten by the perpetual threat of violence) that kept Western Europe at the centre of global affairs.
In the decades that followed other thinkers ranging from Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida have added their own critical theories that helped to dissect the complex inter-relations between this order of knowledge and the regime of political domination that it was intimately connected to. The instrumental fictions that both sustained the narrative of Orientalist discourse and hermetically sutured its self-referential economy have subsequently been laid bare. From the 'Myth of the Lazy Native' that was dispelled by Syed Hussein Alatas to the recovery of the marginalized history of the 'Black Atlantic' by Paul Gilroy to Orientalism's 'dependency on the concept of fixity in the ideological construction of Otherness' as exposed by Homi K. Bhabha, no stone has been left unturned following the storming of the final redoubt of Orientalism.
Upon the trampled foundations of this once-great columbarium of knowledge, a 'global village' of different sometimes competing and incompatible disciplines have pitched their respective tents of varied hues. Ranged from cultural studies, post-colonial studies to subaltern studies, many of these disciplines have evolved with the lingering memory of Orientalism in mind. But in most cases the bad old days of Orientalist scholarship are framed in terms of a dialectical opposite, and Orientalism is regarded as precisely what cultural studies and subaltern studies should not be.
The politically-correct scholar be he an anthropologist, ethnologist, sociologist or even a political scientist is expected to maintain a respectful distance from his subject, and somehow perform the miraculous feat of studying people without looking too closely at them. (For fear of reducing the Other to a mere fixture within a static landscape arrested by the all-colonizing gaze.)
Sincerity undoubted
We do not question or doubt the sincerity of those scholars who wish to demonstrate an abiding respect for the subject/s of their research. If anything, such consideration is and should immediately be recognised as laudable.
Moreover it should be noted that this paradigmatic shift in the worldview of contemporary scholars have also opened up new vistas for research and understanding, inclined as they are to reverse long-inherited (and unquestioned) hierarchies and priorities that have long since served as the pillars of Orientalist scholarship. One such example comes from the work of Nicholas Thomas, who correctly noted that even in the most apparently retrogressive manoeuvres of some post-colonial societies there remains the forward-looking impetus and momentum of progress, indicators of an unstated teleology at work that was in the past at least unrecognised and misunderstood:
'Even if resistance on the part of the colonised seems to entail merely a return to former circumstances, of indigenous sovereignty and cultural autonomy, the struggle to recreate such conditions nevertheless engenders novel perceptions of identity, action and history. What appears to be simply reactive or retrogressive thus amounts to a project, to a whole transformative endeavour'. (1)
Another work that comes to mind is Bobby S. Sayyid's (1997) landmark study of Islamism and its complicated relationship with Eurocentrism.(2) Going against the grain of contemporary (post-Cold War) scholarship that has tended to regard Islamism as a misguided irrational quest for an authentic, nostalgic past, Sayyid sees it as an empowering enterprise to contest the centrality of the Occidental worldview by placing Islam at the centre of all, as a master signifier which not only gives meaning to an entire discursive economy but also sutures it and frame its frontiers.
The critical edge of Sayyid's work, however, manifests itself as he pushes his analysis to its logical conclusion: By putting into question the tendency of both worldviews to exteriorised one other, Sayyid notes that Islamism requires the perpetual presence of Eurocentrism as its constitutive Other in the same way that the Eurocentric worldview depended upon the Orient/Islam in order to mark its own frontier with alterity. Armando Salvatore's (1997) study of the evolution of the political discourse of Modernity in Islam also offers a somewhat similar comparison that takes into account Islamism's dependency on, and intimate relationship with, Eurocentric notions of Modernity and Progress.(3)
Works such as these are, and shall remain, indicators of the concerns of our times. Their particularity and historical specificity lie in the fact that such concerns could only have arisen here and now, the set trajectory of history having brought us to where we stand at the present moment. In such writings we see the evident concern of scholars to demonstrate their respect for the subject of their enquiry and to foreground positive elements previously neglected (either in passing or deliberately) by scholars of the past. In the course of doing so, they also call into question some of the fundamental premises that have guided academic enquiry for decades.
Post-Structuralism has left its indelible mark on disciplines like Ethnology, Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science. We can no longer remain blissfully oblivious to the obvious inter-dependency between these disciplines and the mechanics of power. Scholars who have taken on board the concerns of the Post-Structuralist wave have sought, therefore, to ameliorate their labours by laying bare their own credentials and exhibiting their concern to distance themselves from the workings of Power.
The result has been a post-modern scholarship where the method has become the subject, and where perspective is as important as the object perceived. Such scholars may not take too kindly to being cast as the poets-philosophers of Nietzsche, but they do exhibit a deeper understanding of the mechanics of discourse and the narrative underpinnings of even the most scientific of studies. Bedevilled by the fear of arresting the subject of enquiry within a frozen analytical frame, they have sought to breathe life into the portraits they have drawn.
The constant emphasis on the blind-spots, the unwritten and unstated, the ever-present variables that resist policing, unsettled and unsettling subjectivities, the impossibility of totalisation These are the attendant demons that haunt the scholar of today, whose conscience is forced to labour under the long shadows cast by his predecessors: Burton, Hurgronje, Lawrence, Thesinger.
One nagging concern, however, persists: Living as we do in these troubled times, how do we as academics and researchers conduct ourselves in relation to our respective subjects of enquiry in an impartial, objective and yet critical manner? Can we escape the a posteriori charge that we are, even as we speak, dated and pass, and that we are implicated in the politics of the present in which we find ourselves? Is not the desire to be objective, non-partisan and apolitical itself political in nature? And by trying to remain distant and objective in the context of the here-and-now, are we not in danger of committing a graver error: namely to be silent during the age of Empire and to say nothing when American militarism is on the march?
Endnotes
(1) Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994.
(2) Sayyid, Bobby, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of
Islamism, London: Zed Books, 1997.
(3) Salvatore, Armando, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity,
Lebanon: Ithica Press, 1997.
