Intellectual (Neo-) Imperialism: The Examples of “Islam[ism(s)]” and “Jihad[ism(s)]”
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Abstract
In any scientific endeavour, or considered as such, methodology and epistemology are paramount, not to mention ontology: what is the nature of the reality that we are studying? What is the nature of the knowledge that is being produced and its rationality? What are the methods applied to the field of study? However, when it to comes to “Islam”, the “Middle East”, or the “Orient”, the starting points are assumptions and truisms, particularly in “scientific” fields such as Political Science or International Relations, especially when the subject is the relation between politics and religion. In the last few decades, Islam has become a central point of reference for a wide range of political activities, arguments and opposition movements. The term “political Islam”, or “Islamism”, has been adopted by many scholars in order to identify this seemingly unprecedented irruption of Islamic religion into the secular domain of politics and thus to distinguish these practices from the forms of personal piety, belief, and ritual conventionally subsumed in Western scholarship under the unmarked category “Islam”. There have been tremendous, innumerable websites, voluminous publications and many projects on “Islamism(s)” and “Post-Islamism(s)”, the idea that political Islam had failed. However, when reality did not confirm that prediction, a new term was coined: “neo-Islamism”. This paper aims to explore the thesis that, as in other fields, these labels are nothing more than an attempt by Area Studies within Western academia to mould reality according to preconceived ideas and according to policy-oriented circles and funded by governmental organizations, and that, when dealing with “Islam” and “politics”, we are urgently in need of a different epistemology.
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Carimo Mohomed. (2022). Intellectual (Neo-) Imperialism: The Examples of “Islam[ism(s)]” and “Jihad[ism(s)]”. SIASAT, 7(1), 40-54. https://doi.org/10.33258/siasat.v7i1.110
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Retrieved from http://www.themodernreligion.com/terror/deffundy.html.
Ahmad, Irfan (2008). Cracks in the ‘mightiest fortress’: Jamaat-e-Islami’s changing discourse on women. Modern Asian Studies, 42 (2-3), 549-575.
Ahmad, Irfan (2009). Genealogy of the Islamic State: reflections on Maududi’s political thought and Islamism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, S145-S162.
Aksakal, Mustafa (2011). “Holy War Made in Germany”? Ottoman Origins of the 1914 Jihad. War in History, 18 (2), 184-199.
Ayoob, Mohammed (2008). The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Ayubi, Nazih N. (1991). Political Islam: Religion and politics in the Arab World. London: Routledge.
Bayat, Assef (2007). Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist turn. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Beinin, Joel, & Stork, Joe (eds.) (1997). Political Islam: essays from Middle East Report. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bohman, James (2019). Critical Theory. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive.
Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/critical-theory/
Brachman, Jarret (2008). Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Brown, Nathan J. (2011). How Do Scholars Study Islamist Movements and How Should We Be Studying Them?. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43 (1), 133-134.
Burgat, François (1988). L’islamisme au Maghreb. Paris: Karthala.
Burgat, François (2004). Les courants islamistes contemporains entre “dénominateur commun identitaire” et internationalisation de la résistance à un ordre mondialisé. Revue Mouvements, 36 (novembre), 77-87.
Byrd, Dustin J. (2020). Critical Theory of Religion: From the Frankfurt School to Emancipatory Islamic Thought. Kalamazoo (Michigan): Ekpyrosis Press.
Carnoy, Dominique (1998). Représentations de l’Islam dans la France du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Harmattan.
Deol, Jeevan, & Kazmi, Zaheer (eds.) (2012). Contextualising Jihadi Thought. London: Hurst
During, Simon (ed.) (2007). The Cultural Studies Reader: Third Edition. Abingdon: Routledge.
Esposito, John L. (ed.) (1983). Voices of resurgent Islam. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Esposito, John L. (1996). Islamic Fundamentalism. Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Esposito, John L. (1997). Claiming the Center: Political Islam in Transition. Harvard International Review (Spring). Retrieved from http://www.unaoc.org/repository/Esposito_Political_Islam.pdf.
Esposito, John L. (1999). The Islamic threat: myth or reality? New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Esposito, John L. (2010). Islam: the straight path. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gandhi, Leela (2019). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction: Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gerges, Fawaz A. (2006). Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy. Orlando: Harcourt.
Gerges, Fawaz A. (2009). The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, Voll, John Obert, & Esposito, John L. (1991). The Contemporary Islamic Revival: a critical survey and bibliography. London: Greenwood Press.
Hallaq, Wael B. (2018). Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hirschkind, Charles (1997). What is Political Islam?. Middle East Report, 205 (October-December).
Retrieved from https://merip.org/1997/12/what-is-political-islam/.
Kepel, Gilles (2000). Jihad: expansion et déclin de l’islamisme. Paris: Gallimard. [English edition, Jihad: the trail of Political Islam. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002].
Krämer, Gudrun (1997). Islamist notions of Democracy. In Beinin, Joel, & Stork, Joe (eds.). Political Islam: essays from Middle East Report (pp. 71-82). Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Mamdani, Mahmood (2004). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon.
Mandaville, Peter (2012). Global Jihadism, Subalternity and Urban Islam in the West. In Deol, Jeevan, & Kazmi, Zaheer (eds.) (2012). Contextualising Jihadi Thought (pp. 31-49). London: Hurst.
McCann, Carole R., & Kim, Seung-Kyung (eds.) (2017). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives: Fourth Edition. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mitchell, Jennifer, & Hashmi, Arshi Saleem (2005). Islamism and Islamist Movements: a resource guide. The Middle East Institute/George Camp Keiser Library.
Mohomed, Carimo (2009). Islam and Islamisms: Religion, Politics and Identity. In Long, Ahmad Sunawari et al. (eds.), Issues and challenges of contemporary Islam and Muslims (pp. 107-110). Bangi: Department of Theology and Philosophy, Faculty of Islamic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Mohomed, Carimo (2012). Reconsidering ‘Middle East and Islamic studies’ for a changing world. International Critical Thought, 2 (2), 197-208.
Mohomed, Carimo (2015). Rethinking the ‘Middle East’ as an Object of Study. Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies 31 (2), 265-301.
Mohomed, Carimo (2016). ‘The Parting of the Ways’: A Qutbian Approach to International Relations. In Abdelkader, Deina; Adiong, Nassef Manabilang; & Mauriello, Raffaele (eds.), Islam and International Relations (pp. 165-183). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Mohomed, Carimo (2017). Ideology by Any Other Name: Social Sciences and the Humanities as Western Catechism. In Byrd, Dustin J., & Miri, Seyed Javad (eds.), Ali Shariati and the Future of Social Theory (pp. 21-63). Boston and Leiden: Brill
Rogan, Eugene (2016). Rival jihads: Islam and the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1918. Journal of the British Academy, 4, 1–20.
Roussillon, Alain (2001). Les islamologues dans l’impasse. Esprit (Aug.-Sept.), 93-115.
Roy, Olivier (2001). Les islamologues ont-ils inventé l’islamisme?. Esprit (Aug.-Sept.), 116-38.
Said, Edward W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Said, Edward W. (2005). Power, Politics and Culture: interviews with Edward W. Said. London: Bloomsbury.
Schwedler, Jillian (2011). Studying Political Islam. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43 (1), 135-137.
Shepard, William E. (1987). Islam and ideology: towards a typology. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19 (3), 307-335.
Soares, Benjamin, & Osella, Filippo (2009). Islam, politics, anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, S1-S23.
Staffell, Simon, & Awan, Akil (eds.) (2016). Jihadism Transformed: Al-Qaeda and Islamic State’s Global Battle of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stephan, Maria J. (2009). Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vatin, Jean-Claude (1980). Introduction à «Islam, Religion et politique». Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 29 (1), III-XIV.
Watt, William Montgomery (1988). Islamic Fundamentalism and modernity. London: Routledge.
Zubaida, Sami (2010). Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris.
Zürcher, Erik-Jan (ed.) (2016). Jihad and Islam in World War I. Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s “Holy War Made in Germany”. Leiden: Leiden University Press.