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Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam
Mohammad R. Nafissi
To cite this Article Nafissi, Mohammad R.(1998) 'Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam', Economy and Society, 27: 1, 98
118
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ReCraming Orientalism:
Weber and Islam
Mohammad R. Nafissi
Abstract
In debates on the encounters of Middle Eastern societies with Western modernity,
Max Weber's work is invariably seen as the classical statement of what may be called
sociolo~ical Orientalism. Most 'Third U'orldist' and other anti-Orientalist critics
locate kber i an and neo-Weberian perspectives within Orientalism as a discourse of
Western domination which has remained hegemonic since the mid-nineteenth
centurp In contrast, this paper argues that on11 with the victory of the Bolsheviks in
1917 aqd the subsequent consolidation of the So\iet bloc were conditions in place for
the re-articulation of Orientalism as an ideological construct, a discourse of domi-
nation. 'Weber as well as Marx and other pre-Soviet thinkers are thus relocated outside
the reaqh of the Orientalist/anti-Orientalist opposition, where they display significant
differences from both. The essay then turns to reconsider Weber's specific research
programme and his views on Islam and shows their intrinsic limitations for the current
debate over the rise and trajectory of militant Islamism. It concludes by outlining a
still recognizably Weberian strategy for resolving this debate.
Keywords: Islam; Weber; Orientalism; Wlarxism; Islamism; modernity
Between 1980 and 1993, the Middle East and Nort h Africa as a region registered
the steepast decline in GNP per capita in t he world (World Bank 1995: 163). At
present, none of the forty-six member states of the Islamic Conference Organis-
ation qualify as fully democratic in the con~ent i onal sense of t he term. Cultur-
ally the record is equallq discouraging, whateber the criteria used for assessing
it.
From this angle, the Orientalism debate, triggered with the publication of
Edward Said's book in 1978, and given global political urgencq in t he wake of
t he Lictory of Islamic Revolution i n Iran a year later, is above all about who or
what is responsible for this state of affairs. For t he ideal typical Orientalist, the
problem lies above all within t he civilizational boundaries of a decadent, but
modernity-resisting Islamic religion and the values and institutions associated
with it. In contrast, t he critics of Orientalism emphasize the role of economic
and political factors, and colonialism and neo-colonialism in particular (Hunt er
Ecotzom)~ and Sorzety Volume 27 Number 1 February 1998: 97-118
O Routledge 1998
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1
second anal third points, however, belong to the sphere of causal explanation,
where the scientific claims of sociology and political economy are grounded.
There is widespread agreement among the critics of Orientalism, including
those critical of Said's work, that 'the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable
distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority' (Said 1995:
42; al-'Azm 1984: 35Off.). As a normative assertion, this claim may be exam-
ined and discarded or accepted in reference to some value perceived as ulti-
mate. In gnd of itself, it is not open to empirical validation. Superiority,
however, may also be defined in a descriptive sense that is open to systematic
scrutiny and agreement. Societies can be non-controversially and precisely
classified as more or less powerful in economic, political-military and scientific-
technological terms. On ethical grounds, the less powerful societies may still
be preferred, but the ground for their subordination lies elsewhere and may be
objectively ascertained.
At least from the sixteenth century, if not earlier, in Said's own words, 'the
centre of power shifted westwards' (1995: 205); that is, more than three hundred
years before the emergence of Orientalism as a distinct discourse which has
remained 'unchanged from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s' (1995:
6) until today. The superiority of the West in military, economic and indeed
political tarns was noticed by Muslim merchants, ambassadors, thinkers, states-
men and above all generals whose armies were defeated throughout the nine-
teenth cenrury in various encounters with their Western counterparts. The more
far-sighted among these, including many religious figures, thereby became
'modernizlers' determined to emulate Western institutions, precisely in order to
increase the power of the Ottoman or the Persian states and avoid further humil-
iation and subordination. What we may call the Western historical or social - in
contrast tq ethical or 'natural' - superiority was thus treated as self-evident by
almost all concerned, without the help and prior to the emergence and spread
of the Orientalist discourse.
The question of ethical evaluation can be revisited, now that it is no longer so
indeterminate. The decision to emulate the liberal capitalist order assumes an
ethical stance involving an ultimate value: patriotism, liberty, autonomy, cultural
heritage, prosperity, for example. The very choice of a model thus implies the
recognition of its normative superiority, not necessarily in any absolute sense,
but given the options available. In other words, to safeguard the Islamic heritage
and its practices as much as possible, Muslim societies may have to adopt a
variant of rhe Western model with all the radical compromises this would entail.
For otherwise the choice may involve the loss of Islamic identity altogether
through either direct politico-economic subordination or the demonstration
effects of Western prosperity and military prowess, or both.
Unlike Said, his most insightful and sympathetic critic, Sadiq al-'Azm, has
no hesitation in acknowledging that 'nineteenth century Europe was superior
to Asia asd much of the rest of the world in terms of productive capacities,
social organisation, historical ascendancy, military might, and scientific and
technological development is indisputable as a contingent historical fact' (1984:
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100 Mohammad R. NaJssi
363). The insidious 'essence' of Orientalism was thus not to be found in its
assertion of Western superiority, but in 'its ahistorical bourgeois bent of mind'
which 'did its best to eternalise this mutable fact, to turn it into a permanent
reality past, present, and future'. On this ground, al-'Azm objects, as 'simply
absurd', to labelling as Orientalist 'a radically historicist thinker such as Marx'
(1984: 363). A1-'Azm is right, except that his successful defence of Marx also
rescues many bonafide bourgeois thinkers such as Weber (or many specialist
Orientalists for that matter), precisely because of their equally acute sense of
history. The import of al-'Azm's point is, in any event, clear. Orientalism
cannot be distinguished, much less criticized, in reference to the superiority of
the West as such.
This still leaves the question about the causal obstacles to modernization -
which falls squarely in the domain of debates about development in the Middle
East and, more generally, theThird World. If anywhere, the defining core of Ori-
entalism should be found here: race and ethnicity, religion, culture, sexual habits,
economy, gender relations, polity and ecology have all made an appearance as
causal variables, and some have certainly been employed in the service of Western
colonialism and the exploitation of Muslim and other non-Occidental societies.
But, although Said refers elliptically to what the reader must assume to be the
unitary Orientalist account of the relative stagnation of Islamic societies, he
never pauses to elaborate this account or examine its claims against his own pre-
ferred version. Indeed, such an exercise is explicitly excluded from the purview
of his project. Not, however, because he denies the existence of a reality external
to the discursive representation of the Orient. On the contrary, he acknowledges
that 'it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a
creation with no corresponding reality' (1995: 5, emphasis in the text). But, he
goes on to say that his study 'has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it
tacitly . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally,
not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the
internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as
career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real"
Orient' (1995: 5, emphasis added).
At first glance, this refusal appears to trivialize the whole project. For, if Ori-
ental orders were indeed less desirable than the Western European model in the
sense discussed above, and if this was widely recognized not only by Western
writers and political leaders, but also by the 'Orientals' who came into contact
with Western armies, markets and parliaments, then it follows that the bound-
aries of Orientalism as the discourse specified by Said would collapse, unless it
could further be shown that it included a unitary account of the Orient, and that
this account in some significant sense distorted its reality so as to facilitate, legit-
imize and promote Western domination. In Orientalism, Said explicitly addresses
only the first of these propositions, the assumed inferiority of the Oriental orders
to the European model. Notwithstanding his much noticed erudition and
occasional insights (Ahmad 1992: 177, 222), the substantive import of his work
is thereby considerably reduced.
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Rejiaming Orientalism 10 1
An explanation is read) to hand for this curious refusal to treat Orientalism
on a causal level: to have done so would have entailed a drastic trimming down
of its sweeping scope. Noting the breadth of his concept without any trace of
irony, Said acknowledges that 'this Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say,
and Victor Hugo, Dante and Marx' (1995: 3). Only in this way can Marx's and
Weber's different sociological accounts of the Orient's relative backwardness be
lumped t ~get her or lined up along with various racist accounts and literary treat-
ments as Orientalist. But this is not the whole story. Said may refuse to elabor-
ate a causal theory of the subordination of the Orient, but it may be that such a
theory is assumed in his work. This also helps to explain both the self-righteous
tone of the work and its ready reception and influence among radical academics
in the universities in Europe and North America.
Said's references to the ways that the Orientalists have accounted for the stag-
nation of Muslim societies, despotism, Islam, race, self-sufficient village com-
munities, hedonism and so on, all invariably imply the inadequacy of these
variables separately or together. But what do the many authors who put forward
these causal factors have in common? They did not just assume, implicitly or
explicitly, the superiority of their own native lands and ways of life, but also
thought, inasmuch as they thought at all about the question, that the observed
or imagined characteristics of Oriental societies were products of causes internal
to those societies, rather than the consequence of Western domination and pen-
etration.
Said's stance is different, though not new. As he notes, his 'project has been
to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system
with a new one' (1995: 325). This project, however, is not without foundation:
it is premised on, and indeed made possible by, the contributions of the 'depen-
dency school' to development studies, which has dominated radical thinking
about the Third World in recent decades. The dependency theorists typically
explained the plight of Third World countries and their comparative backward-
ness in terms of the contradictory logic of capitalism as it expands globally. Con-
ceiving of capitalism as a world system, the conditions of its developed and
underdeveloped parts were said to be mutually determined. In Andre Gunder
Frank's celebrated dictum (1970), development and underdevelopment were the
two poles of a single exploitative relationship.
It is thanks to the 'externalist' teachings of this theory, the unsung hero of
Said's book, that his construction of Orientalism as a unitary discourse could be
maintained and all internalist accounts of underdevelopment condemned as both
misguided and complicit in promoting Western domination. The assumption of
the dependency theorists' broad agenda enables Said to conclude Orientalzsm
with the following battle cry:
No one can escape dealing with, if not the East/West division, then the
North/South one, the have/have-not one, the imperialist/anti imperialist one,
the wlnite/coloured one. We cannot get around them all by pretending they do
not exist; on the contrary contemporary Orientalism teaches us a great deal
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102 Mohammad R. NaJissi
about the intellectual dishonesty of dissembling on that score, the result of
which is to intensify the divisions that make them both vicious and permanent.
(Said 1995: 327)
In his forceful critique of Orientalism, al-'Azm fails to see that what he aptly calls
Said's 'Orientalism in reverse' is premised on the dialectic of develop-
ment/underdevelopment. As a result, he himself performs a similar reversal on
Said and accuses him of the failure to follow the dependency theorists and
thereby 'ending his book on a distinctly Orientalist note' (1984: 366)! Without
reliance on one or other 'externalist' account of underdevelopment, Orientalism
would revert from Said's discourse of domination to a descriptive category
denoting a differentiated, changing body of specialist scholarly texts, some more
accurate and insightful, some more politically charged and polemical, some both,
some sympathetic to their subjects, others racialist. Conversely, it may be said
that two decades after the publication of Said's book the debate rages on at least
in part because all 'internalist' accounts (even if only in terms of emphasis) con-
tinue to be viewed as Orientalist by his followers and sympathetic critics. The
point is illustrated with exemplary clarity in Nazih Ayubi's summary review of
the debate:
Max Weber and (in one way or another) the majority of 'Orientalists' have
looked for factors within Muslim societies themselves, and have considered
these factors to be responsible for [Muslim societies'] stagnation. . . . This
approach overlooks the fact that both the Muslim world, as well as the rest of
Asia and Africa, which were not dominated by Islamic influences, were stag-
nating, and that this was occurring in correspondence with the colonial expan-
sion of Europe. . . . If development did not take place, then it must have been
because of an 'external' factor - because of colonialism which dominated
politically and exploited economically, and which also led to cultural humili-
ation and the loss of self-confidence.
(Ayubi 1991: 55-6; see also Sadowski 1993)
Only on the basis of some such causal outline of developments in the Muslim
world is the broad sweep of the Orientalism of the anti-Orientalists and the
designation of Weber as Orientalist sustainable.
Weber's research pr ogr amme a nd twentieth-century
Ori ent al i sm
Weber and the 'Orientalists' associated with him would thus above all stand
condemned, if it were shown that the original failure of development in
the Middle East, or indeed in the rest of the 'Orient', was due to the 'external
factor' of colonialism. That Weber's general approach to the emergence of mod-
ernity is premised on the diverse, internally driven developmental trajectories
of the major civilizations is undeniable. But, notwithstanding the continuing
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Reframing Orientalism 103
controversy about Weberian and other theories of the emergence of modernity,
today there is hardly any disagreement among historical sociologists about the
distinctness of the European path prior to the advent of colonialism. There is,
in other words, a consensus that it was primarily the accumulation of economic,
political and scientific power in Western Europe that laid the ground for the sub-
ordination of the rest of the world.
Howeveb; this particular story, too, runs further. For the subsequent worldwide
expansion of capitalism, variously promoted by, as well independent of, colonial-
ism, created a 'global civilization' in which European artefacts, ideals, institutions
and models have predominated. This expanding civilization and its native carri-
ers thence variously shaped the lives of peoples everywhere, for better or worse
and often both. This process was not even, nor did it extend across uniform social
landscapes. The articulation of the external and internal forces variously redrew
the boundaries and constitutions of all pre-capitalist orders, and thereby called
for new uqits and factors of analysis. To deny or downplay the adverse effects of
this proce8s in the name of the enduring civilizational integrity of Islam and the
Middle East is open to the charge of being an apology for colonialism and neo-
colonialism. Orientalism would then be the right designation for such an apology,
but one with its long historical reach drastically clipped.
The common view of Weber as the locus classzcus of sociological Orientalism
overlooks rhe fundamental break between the contemporary vantage point and
Weber's eqa and research programme. Weber's question was about the origins of
modern rational capitalism, not the process of its spread outside its European
birthplaces. In answering the former in his own distinct way, he famously came
to believe that he had thereby resolved the latter as well:
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in
the worFd, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable
power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the
spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped the
cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations,
needs it's support no longer.
(Weber 1930: 181-2)
Put differently, as for Marx, so for Weber, England showed India the image of
its future in what had become a universal history marked by the instrumental
rationality of a self-expanding capitalist system. What was interesting therefore
was the unwritten causal sociological histories of the great civilizations, not the
already written, 'petrified' post-history of their common 'nullity' (1930: 182).
From this vantage point, instead of being Orientalists, Weber and his precursors
must be ranked among the 'Third Worldists' and anti-Orientalists, if only insofar
as they, too, assumed the primacy of the external factors in transforming the
remaining 'traditional' societies.
In many respects this has come to pass, but evidently not at all with the kind
of mechanical pace assumed by Weber (see, however, Weber (1994[1906]) for the
explicit rejection of any causal association or even 'elective affinity' between
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104 Mohammad R. Najssi
'today's advanced capitalism' and democracy; cf. Rueschemeyer et al. (1992:
21)). And the debate today (or more precisely since the victory of the Bolshe-
viks) has been about how the process broke down in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt or, for
that matter, in Russia, Germany and Japan. But to assume that there is an unbro-
ken continuity between Renan, Marx, Weber and other nineteenth-century
thinkers and Lewis, Pipes, Huntington or even Gellner, Mann and Crone is to
elide conceptual and historical distinctions in favour of a decontextualized fix-
ation on the emphasis by both groups on the role of 'internal' factors in explain-
ing 'backwardness' (cf. Sadowski 1993).
After more than a century of global integration and transformation, there is
a significant break between Weber's choice of internal factors and his research
programme and the 'internalism' of the contemporary writers. While Weber's
comparative sociology was legitimately premised on the relative isolation of
civilizations, the same cannot be said for Lewis, Huntington or Kramer (Lewis
1990, 1995; Huntington 1993, 1996; Kramer 1996). These writers can therefore
be criticized for ignoring or downplaying the part played by the international
factors, whereas Weber should not.
As a 'world system', modern capitalism thrives as a set of reinforcing pro-
cesses that undermine and detotalize historical civilizations. This is precisely
why Weber lamented and at the same time celebrated the ultimate superfluous-
ness of Protestant Christianity as an enduring source of the capitalist spirit.
Already in the late nineteenth century, Weber had thereby rejected the claim of
the 'neo-Weberian' Huntington that 'for the relevant future there will be no uni-
versal civilisation, but instead a world of different civilisations each of which will
have to learn to coexist with the others' (1993: 49). Any use of 'civilization' to
define particular geo-political zones (the West, the Middle East and so on) in
terms of their dominant religious beliefs and practices is legitimate from a con-
temporary Weberian standpoint only as a partial distinguishing factor, rather
than as the signifier of a historically continuous and decisive totality.
A genuinely Weberian stance would nevertheless be equally distant from the
anti-Orientalist positions that reject the autonomous efficacy of Islamic religion
and attempt to resolve the debate at the level of the world capitalist system and
the characteristics that Muslim countries share with the rest of the Third World.
In this respect, Weber appears to share the mainstream 'neo-Weberian' cum
'Orientalist' treatment of religious values and institutions as obstacles to
modernization. Overwhelming as the transformative power of rational capital-
ism may be, it does not operate in a vacuum:
At present time, all these people import this 'commodity' [technical economic
rationalism] as the most important Occidental product, and whatever impedi-
ments exist result from rigid traditions. . . not from any lack of ability or will.
Such impediments to rational economic development must be sought pri-
marily in the domain of religion, insofar as they must not be located in the
purely political conditions.
(Weber 1968: 630)
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The point of the argument so far is not to make a special plea on behalf of Weber,
following al-'Azm's or Ahmad's pleas for Marx's innocence. Not only Weber and
Marx, but others associated with the dominant liberal strand of nineteenth-
century civilization, too, must be acquitted as a group, as they were initially
charged on the basis of a shared position:
For any European during the nineteenth century - and I think one can say
this without qualification - Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in
Nietzsche's sense of the word. It is therefore correct that every European, in
what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist
and almost totally ethnocentric.
(Said 1995: 204)
Contrary to Said, it is precisely the universality of this consensus that under-
mines the whole application of the concept of Orientalism to the nineteenth
century. If everyone in nineteenth-century Europe (and elsewhere) was an Ori-
entalist, even without having come in contact with an Orientalist or an Orien-
talist text in the narrow, specialist, sense of the term, then it self-evidently
follows that, first, Orientalism itself is derivative from a more comprehensive dis-
course, and, second, the universality of Orientalism is merely a truism. It is not
so much the di~ersity of the positions Said brings together as Orientalist as the
wide breadth of the consensus he underlines which exhibits the triviality of his
thesis insofar as it concerns nineteenth-century thinkers.
The point can be illustrated by asking a question thrown up by the passage
just cited: why is it that the same sweeping claim is not advanced in case of the
twentieth-century writers? In the nineteenth century Said can roam around and
find an Orientalist everywhere, from Marx to Mark Twain and from Flaubert to
Weber, every European, as he says. In the twentieth century, the age in which
Oriental studies multiplied as never before, he has to cast his net ever narrower.
The answer is not complex. Orientalism as a distinct (sub-) discourse can be
dated, if at all, only to when its shared assumptions are contested; when the
possibility of a new way of looking at the world emerges, discursively, but also
institutionally and politically, and on a global scale.
The conditions for the emergence of Orientalism/anti-Orientalism as mutu-
ally exclusive discourses need not be traced to any earlier than October 1917
when the Bolshevik seizure of power in the most backward of all European states
turned it overnight into the most 'advanced'. This new vantage point allowed the
assumption of the superiority of the liberal world to be questioned. Instead, it
engendened theories which link the postponement of the revolution in the West
to the victory of revolution in Russia and the prospects for revolutionary
upheavals further east. If Russia, then whq not China, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq and
eventually Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan. They could all not only catch up
with the hitherto superior West, but overtake it - if only in terms of the ebolu-
tionary stages of world history wherein socialism ranks higher than capitalism.
Lenin's theory of imperialism alread? contained the central idea of the world
system alhd dependencj theories, namely that colonial plunder and imperialist
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106 Mohammad R. Najssi
domination at once explained the prosperity in imperialist countries and the
failure of Western revolutionary movements - as well as the consequent poverty
and super-exploitation that cleared the ground for revolution in the colonies and
semi-colonies. It was only with Stalin's ascendancy, however, that Russia finally
and decisively broke with the dialectical conception of advanced capitalism and
socialism and the nineteenth-century liberal consensus on which it rested
(Polanyi 1964: pts 1 & 3; Claudin 1975: ch. 2).
From the high rates of growth of the Soviet Union or the eradication of
poverty and illiteracy in Cuba compared to the rest of the Latin America, to the
heroic Vietnamese success in the war against the US, the evidence in favour of
a superior, anti-Western path to development was indeed impressive. The col-
onial record of the Western powers, on the other hand, was compounded by their
support for post-colonial autocracies and Israel's expansionism, undermining
their claims to champion freedom and democracy. The superiority of liberal
capitalism could now be rejected on both normative and positive grounds,
together with internalist accounts of underdevelopment. The path was thus
paved for the construction of Orientalism as found in the work of Said and his
radical followers. Yet, the older paradigm of classical social theory survived
apparently almost intact in the mainstream social sciences.
Marx and Weber were now redeployed to account for the perceived failures
of modernization in the post-colonial world emerging after the Second World
War. In the process, Marx's followers broke with Marx by denying the progres-
sive qualities of capitalism in the 'age of imperialism' and went on to deny the
dialectic between developed capitalism and socialism. Nevertheless they
remained recognizably Marxist since all of Marx's key concepts were retained in
what was in fact a new discourse. The struggle of proletariat and capitalists was
cast into the struggle between capitalist and proletarian nations, between the
haves and have nots, the imperialist exploiters and anti-imperialist exploited,
between the socialist and the capitalist camps.
Something similar happened to Weber. His concepts, and the comparative
research programme which was framed with the emergence of capitalism in
view, were transposed to the period with which he was not systematically con-
cerned. Religion, the uniqueness of the West, patrimonialism, traditionalism and
Weber's methodological and normative positions were all now re-employed. The
evident ease with which this took place should not be surprising. Weber's sub-
stantive focus on pre-capitalist formations was consonant with downplaying, if
not disregarding, the blocking effects of the 'external' factors in the development
of Third World states. His comprehensive opposition to socialism and reduc-
tionist Marxism, too, was propitious for the mainstream social sciences on both
theoretical and political grounds within the polarizing context of the capital-
ism-socialism rivalry. The shared elements of Marxism and the Weberian off-
spring of the German school of historical political economy were thus
submerged in the overriding emphasis on their differences. Weber came to be
seen as an 'internalist', and above all a cultural-religious reductionist, because
this is how his work was received and read in comparative reference to Marxism.
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The disinclination to include religious or cultural factors in social science
analysis among some radical analysts goes beyond the rejection of conservative
Weberia4 and Orientalist approaches. In part, the reluctance stems from the
intrinsic difficulty of defining and measuring the influence of religious practices
and ideas on politico-economic development. Compared to the more or less
clearly bounded economic and political variables, religious 'world views' are less
tangible, harder to define and more open to varied interpretations and dispute.
But other considerations have been at least as important in downplaying the role
of religiqn in favour of economic and political agencies in radical anti-Oriental-
ist accounts. Unlike 'natural' factors, political and economic institutions are
social and therefore historical or changeable. They can be personified in the form
of the ruling classes and Clites as agents of exploitation, oppression and under-
development. Religion, too, is social, but its indictment as a cause of backward-
ness directly implicates the masses. Although they can be distinguished as
internal or external causes of backwardness, imperialism and colonialism, patri-
monial despotism, paucity of water and rain, ferocious tribes, the corruption of
the klite pnd the lack of strong states are all external to the ordinary people who
have beeh the real victims of these forces. Religious values and practices, in con-
trast, are inseparably meshed with the innermost identities of the masses them-
selves.
For the eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century enlightened liberals and
other prbgressives, this posed no special anguish. In contrast, twentieth- century
modernizers were themselves divided over alternative models of modernization.
The fundamental choice was increasingly seen as between the oppressed masses
of the Third World and their autocratic rulers, kept in power largely by the ex-
colonial ,or new American masters. Radical social scientists, by definition, chose
the former, but, being Marxists or deeply under its influence, they were by no
means favourably disposed towards religion. Theoretically equipped to dismiss
it as superstructural and derivative, they rather tended to view mainstream social
scientists' and Orientalists' emphasis on the importance of religion as complicit
in impetialist domination - if only by diverting attention from the main issues
and struggles. From here is but a small step to considering Weber the arch-Ori-
entalist thinker 'who did more than anyone else to systematize, transform into a
theory, ~ n d base upon learned arguments' the view that Islamic 'fatalism' is
responsible for the stagnation of Muslim societies and the 'listlessness' of
Muslims (Rodinson 1974: 76).
Weber and Islam
Weberians' own reading of Weber's work, of course, do not deny his persistent
insisteye on treating culture (including both the religious and intellectual
sphere$ as an autonomous, constitutive domain of social life and social change
(cf. Schroeder 1992: 23). However, there has been a long-standing debate over
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culturalist as against multi-causal interpretation of Weber. But we need to be
careful before taking sides, as it can be argued that he is preaching one thing
and doing another. It has been noted that this tension especially permeates
Weber's sociology of religion (Fulbrook 1983; see also Mommsen 1989: ch. 10).
At one level, Weber appears to see himself engaged in a series of comparative
studies functioning as controlled experiments which would demonstrate the
overriding efficacy of various religions in blocking or, as in case of Protes-
tantism, promoting modernity. Yet, from another angle, his writings tend to
undermine the whole exercise by presenting the diversity of conditions, politi-
cal and economic, that had to be held constant in order to achieve meaningful
results in the first place.
There is strong evidence in favour of the pluralist reading of Weber. Con-
sidering Weber a pluralist is another way of saying that he did not intend to
produce a comprehensive or determinate theory, but instead elaborated a series
of questions, concepts, ideal types and specific theories which may be variously
used in historical analysis. This view finds overwhelming support in his
methodological writings and other explicit statements on the aims of social sci-
ences. In his own historical analysis of the emergence of modern capitalism, on
the other hand, he did evidently come to consider one factor, namely religion,
'all important' or primary (Weber 1951: 238; cf. 1930: 183). But even this con-
clusion does not necessarily assume or entail a general theory. He may have been
wrong in his analysis, and the primacy ascribed to Protestantism or Confucian-
ism may have been exaggerated or misconceived. But to judge the issue is, as
Weber himself emphasized, an empirical question and therefore ultimately the
task of specialist historians (Weber 1930: 28; 1949: 102ff.).
This question cannot be pursued here, but Weber's views on both modern
capitalism and pre-modern Islam tend to reinforce the case for multi-causal
interpretation. It has already been noted that Weber's view of established capital-
ism is almost identical with Marx's in that Weber, too, acknowledges the over-
riding, almost mechanical, 'primacy' of the economy in the new era. More
interesting, however, is the surprise in store for those who turn to Weber's own
rather scarce and scattered comments on Islam, expecting to find the cultural
'essentialism' of the critics of Orientalism. For, as Schroeder concedes, contra
his own culturalist reading of Weber, whereas in his studies of other religions
the religious or cultural sphere is autonomous from the economic and political
spheres, 'Islam is different . . . because the spheres of religion and politics are
interconnected . . . or, put differently, not cultural but political change - or, in
this case, stability - was the primary obstacle' (Schroeder 1992: 69). Turner's
elaboration of the same point similarly addresses the presumptions of Weber's
anti-Orientalist critics:
Was it the case that Islam's ethic of worldly pleasure in some way caused
the absence of rationality in law and the absence of a free market and
independent city life? This is certainly not Weber's position. His argument is
the opposite. Weber shows that with prebendal feudalism and patrimonial
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Reframing Orientalism 109
bureaucracy which were characteristic of the Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman
dynasties, the pre-requisites of rational capitalism could not emerge . . . .
Althoulgh Weber continually slips into the position of plural causality and
causal indeterminacy, the overall thrust of his study of Islam is that Islamic
society was one characterised by patrimonial domination which made politi-
cal, economic and legal relations unstable and arbitrary, or irrational in
Weber's sense.
(Turner 1974: 13-14)
Weber's account may of course still be discarded on a variety of grounds, ranging
from ambiguity, unsystematicity, dated and 'misleading' sources (Turner 1996:
269) to the problematic reduction of Islam in places to a variant of the 'feudal'
spirit whi ~h precluded 'the ethical concept of salvation' (Weber 1968: 623ff.).
Indeed, Weber can be charged, as he is by Turner, with relying on 'Orientalist'
scholars in his comments on Islam (1996: ch. 9; cf. Rodinson 1974: 115ff.),
though it is difficult to see what other choice was open to him. More signifi-
cantly, he may be criticized, from a Weberian perspective, for underestimating
or ignoring both the ethical dimensions of Islam and the way, for example, the
Caesaropapist legacy of its prophet's unique rule may have shaped subsequent
developments. Preoccupied with the question of the emergence of capitalism,
and viewillg religion from the perspective of economic ethics, Weber ignored
many of the questions that are of concern today, namely the relationship between
Islam and other ingredients of modernity, democracy, gender equality and sec-
ularism. Ironically, though understandably, Rodinson's influential account of
Islam and capitalism remains within the confines of Weber's rather narrow prob-
lematic. Thus, even if the former's rejection of the assumed dissonance between
Islam and capitalism were to be wholly accepted, Islam could still be seen as
'blocking' modernization in other ways.
In any case, such criticisms in no way confirm Weber's Orientalism, especi-
ally of the variant that finds Islam as the cause of 'listlessness' of Muslims or as
'the family curse that lives on' (Sadowski 1993: 20). Weber's contrary views are
unusually clear: 'to assume that the Hindu, Chinese or Muslim merchants,
trader, artisan, or coolie was animated by a weaker "acquisitive drive" than the
ascetic Prqtestant is to fly in the face of facts' (1968: 630). If anything, Weber
erred in the opposite direction of considering Islam as a religion of militant
'world conquest' in contrast to the 'world-accommodation of Confucianism . . .
world-rejection of Buddhism . . . or messianic expectations and economic pariah
law of Judaism' (1968: 630; see also 623ff and 1185). It is, in any event, notable
that the emphasis in recent scholarship on the enduring importance of patri-
monialism in pre-modern Islamic societies is consonant with the main thrust of
Weber's analysis (Lapidus 1988). This affinity is clearly in evidence in Ayubi's
own last wajor work (1995: 38ff.), even though he continues to refer to an Ori-
entalism 'promoted by Weber and his disciples [that] would maintain that
Middle Easterners are not advanced or not efficient, because most of them are
Muslims' (1995: 3 15).
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110 Mohammad R. Naj s s i
An Islamic civilization?
With the recent rise of 'political Islam' to the position of 'the dominant idiom
in the politics and culture' of the Middle East and North Africa (Zubaida 1995:
182), the current phase of the debate more than ever concentrates on what is
seen as the Weber question par excellence: whether the region can be understood
in terms of a transnational 'Muslim Society' (Gellner 1981) or an essentially self-
enclosed 'Islamic Civilization' (Lewis 1990; Huntington 1993, 1996) competing
and clashing with other similarly bounded and enduring civilizations. Weber's
own work, as has been shown, offers no support to the civilizational thesis, which
bases itself on a decontextualized and reductionist pre-eminence of religious
factors. However, at present the problem of carving out a genuinely Weberian
position arises from the fact that the anti-Orientalist critics demand more than
the recognition of the importance of the role of 'external' factors or economic
and political institutions in the historical evolution and the present plight of
Muslim societies. They also 'challenge "Islam" as a coherent sociological or
political entity or category in sociological and political analysis' (Zubaida 1995:
153), and indeed consider the treatment of classical Islamic traditions as 'an
independent variable, an explanatory factor' in the Middle Eastern develop-
ments the very hallmark of Orientalism (Halliday 1995: 203). In this light, the
positions of Weber and Weberians of all hues, multi-causalists, structuralists and
historicists as well as culturalists, would fall clearly within the purview of Ori-
entalism. But then Orientalism (and 'Weberism') so defined, may not be as
indefensible as its critics argue.
The anti-Orientalist case against this broad formulation of Orientalism may
be summed up in the notion of the changing diversity of 'Islam'. Strictly speak-
ing, it is mistaken to talk about a Muslim society or civilization because, so the
argument goes, of the overriding diversity of its components. Some of the pre-
sumed characteristics of Islam brought to the fore in the Islamist agenda in the
twentieth century did not feature in most of its 'purer' pre-colonial periods. The
all-important, modernity-resistant unity of state and religion, for example, has
in fact hardly been more than a discarded ideal for much of Islamic history. As
Sami Zubaida notes, 'Islamic empires, at least since the time of the Umayyads,
have maintained a def i ct o distinction between the state and society, and religion
entered both but in different ways, and except for brief periods, was neither
dominant over nor coincident with either state or society' (1993: 41; see also
Keddie 1995: 34ff). Moreover, it is likely that, if the earlier secular nationalist
and socialist movements had succeeded in delivering on their economic and
political promises, the process of secularization would have continued unabated
and the Islamic movements would have remained marginal and in any case easily
suppressed (see Zubaida 1993: ch. 6).
The assertion of reviving Islamic traditions implicit in the notion of funda-
mentalism is similarly questionable, because, in the past too, these traditions
were not unitary nor were they approximate to their contemporary
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representations. Political Islam, to be sure, has become a dominant idiom, but,
first, this is a 'modern' development and, second:
Many gifferent and even contradictory interests, ideas, sentiments and aspir-
ations are being expressed in terms of this [Islamist] idiom. In this respect, it
has re$laced nationalism and socialism/Marxism which played a similar role
in earller decades. As such, it does not represent a unitary ideology or world
view, Gut expresses many different ones.
(Zubaida 1995: 182-3; see also 1993: xx-xxiv)
Not only sectarian and other cultural differences, but also national economic
differences and resilient state boundaries, whether historical or drawn by col-
onial powers, significantly constrain the pan-Islamic, let alone global, aspirations
of Islamists everywhere, as they destroyed the dreams of pan-Arab unit1 in
previous (decades.
The possibility of reconciling the institutionally and theologically distinct
Shii establishment with the Sunni ulamma (a relatively marginal stratum in the
formatio4 of Islamist movements in Arab countries) appears remote. The geo-
cultural foundation of Islamism is further undermined by its 'inability to move
beyond either nationalism or even ethnicity . . . Islamo-nationalism wins out
over pan-Islamism' (Roy 1994: 201). The competitive and often openly belliger-
ent nature of the existing relationships between and within the 'Muslim' coun-
tries of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Azarbaijan, Iraq, the Lebanon,
Kuwait, the Sudan, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Tajikestan, Syria, Jordan, Morocco
and Algenia bears this out. Apart from Palestine and Bosnia, where aggression
has been primarily instigated or sustained by the guardians of what Lewis calls
'our JudebChristian heritage' (1990: 60), it is not, contra Huntington, Islam that
has 'bloody borders' (1993: 35). Blood is running through different Islamic
countries ro sustain borders established in the twentieth century or to create new
ones along ethnic and sectarian lines.
The ri4e of Islamism itself would be inexplicable without colonialism, the
Cold Wari the creation and expansion of Israel, and oil, all of which on balance
have tendqd to undermine democratic forces, religious and secular, and retarded
the formation of independent classes and accountable states. At the same time,
the incor~oration of 'Muslim society' into the 'global society' of the past two
hundred years has irrevocably pluralized the former, over and above pre-exist-
ing sectarian diversities, and increasingly subjected the Middle Eastern states to
the norms and standards of rational capitalism and bureaucratic organization.
This process has given rise to agencies of secularization as well as to liberal and
modern iaterpretations of Islam. However relatively weak at the political or cul-
tural level at present (and their strength varies in different states), the socio-
economic base and the role of these forces is vital and growing. The stagnating
economies of Islamic countries are still increasingly tied to the powerful centres
of the world economy outside the Muslim world. In contrast, intra-Islamic trade
and econopic ties are relatively insignificant.
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112 Mohammad R. Najssi
These factors explain why, unlike Communism, Islamism in power every-
where has shown itself incapable of overcoming the post-revolutionary phase of
transition: it is a new type of permanently transitional regime. The decisive
example of this inescapable instability is provided by Iran's Islamic Republic.
Having suppressed the secular and Islamic oppositions at great cost, the div-
isions between Islamists opened up almost immediately over the questions which
had led to the exclusion of their ideological opponents in the first place. As a
consequence, as Lewis acknowledges, 'the Islamic Republic of Iran holds con-
tested elections and allows more freedom of debate and criticism in the press and
in its parliament than is usual in most Muslim countries, but there are exacting
and strictly enforced limitations on who may be a candidate, what groups may
be formed, and what ideas may be expressed' (1993: 91). The Islamist economic
programmes are either indistinct from the blueprints current elsewhere or have
vague, inconsistent or inoperable promises of Islamic justice added on (Behdad
1995; Nomani and Rahnema 1994). Nor will Iran or any potential coalition of
Islamist states ever have the military power to create an Islamic camp in the way
that the Red Army established a socialist one. Any illusions in this regard were
put to rest by the two Gulf wars.
Arguments along these lines dispose of Huntington's 'clash of civilizations'
thesis or Bernard Lewis's claim that, with the collapse of Communism, 'peoples
and governments of the Middle East, for the first time in two centuries, will
determine their own fate' (1995: 386). But they do not rule out the efficacy of
Islamic traditions or the credentials of the Islamists.
To reject Islam as a unitary force at a level that is sociologically significant
entails a ban on the use of all normative and ideologically contested ideal types.
No ideology or religion will ever achieve singular unity in any absolute sense.
The question is whether or not, despite the diversities of interpretation and
interests expressed by Islam (or political Islam), it retains any integrity that dis-
tinguishes it as recognizably Islamic, positively and negatively, and thus distinct
from nationalism, socialism/Marxism, liberalism, Christianity and other
religious traditions. Contrary to an assumption which has been given wide cur-
rency in anti-Orientalist critiques, the denial of diversity is not a necessary
aspect of Orientalism. Bernard Lewis, the much targeted doyen of contempor-
ary Orientalism, readily admits that 'the movement nowadays called Funda-
mentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant,
more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of the Islamic civilisa-
tion in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail'
(1990: 60). The militant Islamists, too, recognize diversity and change, albeit
with a view to eliminating both. Their account of the one and only 'true' Islam
assumes the many 'false' and changing varieties of Islam that have claimed the
prophet's mantel since his passing.
The selection of the pertinent ideal type of Islam varies with the question
asked. For an enquiry concerned with the development of philosophical thought,
the Islam of the historically marginalized philosophers would be of primary
importance, whereas from the point of view of sociological significance and
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political mobilization, the philosophically vapid and legalistic Islam of the
fughaha is crucial. Neither thereby represents the true or the more authentic
Islam; although the question of authenticity can still be pursued in its own right.
Nor do they encompass an enclosed unitary reality; they can be broken down
into narrower ideal types focusing on particular schools of Islamic philosophy or
jurisprudence. But this possibility does not render the broader ideal types false
or useless,
Islamism, socialism and nationalism are all ideologies promising worldly
and/or other worldly salvation to their actual and potential converts. But to col-
lapse them together in consequence of their shared characteristics is different
from asking, in the light of a particular problem, whether it is legitimate to speak
about a civilization or culture in a sociologically significant sense. The existence
of Islam i11this sense and of the movements that spread by mobilizing, inevitably
selectively, its surviving values, texts, institutions and practices does not necess-
arily mean that other, international or national, factors are less important or that
they do not variously mediate Islamic traditions. 'Essentialism' and other similar
charges should arise when other units of analysis are excluded or portrayed as
derivative and inessential. Otherwise, Zubaida, Halliday and others can similarly
be taken to task for essentializing diversity and to that extent threatening the lia-
bility of all social science analysis.
Compared to that of all the other major world religions and ideologies, the
fundamental message of Islam appears particularly solid. With its single supreme
and histopically authenticated holy book, a Prophet who founded a state and
presided aver the community of believers in historical and documented times,
and unified the temporal and spiritual realms in many practices and institutions,
Islam is unique (Halliday 1995: 58, cf. 203ff.). Islam is not Christianity or Bud-
dhism and this must make a difference, at least insofar as long as the question of
establishiqg a genuine Muslim (or indeed a Christian or Buddhist) society is on
the political agenda. The fact that Mohammad and Islam founded a state and an
empire, whereas Christianity emerged in the shadow of the most developed state
of the time and initially grew by conceding to Caesar what was his, offers very
different ideals of the good life to the follou~ers of the two faiths. If the question
is whether, in asserting the unity of the temporal and spiritual or calling for a
transnatiofial Islamic Community, the Islamists are referring to a comparatively
entrenched and recognizable Islamic tradition, the answer must be yes.
~i st ori dal discontinuities such as the dtfacto separation of religion and state
in medievdl Islam and various sectarian schisms do not eliminate the continuity
of classical traditions as ideals. In fact, their mobilizing force may be enhanced
as a result. The golden age of Mohammad's reign was brief and the conditions
for its revival no longer exist. But this does not alter the fact that, in contrast to
other golden ages at the core of other religious and secular revolutionary move-
ments, theIslamic one is historically grounded and retains a civilizational reach
that transcends sectarian and national divides.
The discontinuity in question is, in any case, not as pronounced as it is made
out to be. The Abbasid or Ottoman empires and other Muslim dynasties may
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116 Mohammad R. Najissi
It consists of several phases, beginning with Islamizing further the actually exist-
ing Islamic states and, where possible, capturing state power on the way to
eventually uniting the whole of Islamdom. Once Islam is restored to a position
approximating to its former glory, the stage may be set for liberation of the non-
Islamic world. The phases of this process are related to each other in a way akin
to the minimum and maximum programmes of communist movements. The
minimum objectives, the consolidation of distinctly Islamic practices and
organizations, are pursued in the context of pre-Islamic statehood. In the
medium term, the state is taken over by the Islamic forces and a symbiosis of
sorts is achieved between the Islamicized society and the Islamizing state. The
maximum programme would require reunification of Islamic states in a trans-
national superstate in which culture and political power are CO-extensive.
These aims are already realized to varying extents in every Muslim country
and community throughout the world. The high visibility of the cultural bound-
aries of Islamdom attests this claim. In one form or another, Shari'a has always
been entrenched both in the state constitution and legal systems of all Muslim
countries and in the everyday life of believers. The degree of this entrenchment
varies widely between different Muslim societies, individual believers and his-
torical periods. And the implementation of Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia or Iran
is evidently more extensive than in Iraq or Turkey. Yet, all four countries are
immediately recognizable as Islamic when compared to other societies, Western
and Eastern, and indeed the degree of their Islamicity is measured in relation to
the extent to which they conform to Shari'a or to the Western secular model.
The medium-term programme, too, is evidently realized in several states,
from Afghanistan to the Sudan. What appears utopian is the maximalist ideal of
resurrecting Islamdom as a political unity. What make it utopian are precisely
the global and national factors that limit and keep the social and political basis
and advances of the first two 'realistic' phases of the Islamist project unstable
and reversible. Islamism thrives largely on the modernity-repellent aspects of
Islam; but, in a world irrevocably modern and modernizing, Islamism and the
Islam that sustains it will be increasingly marginalized. In failing to achieve econ-
omic, political and cultural power superior to that of the rival models - secular,
or Islamic of the liberal and reformist varieties - Islamism will not only fail to
unify Muslim societies, it will at the same time destabilize and divide its own
social constituency and undermine the religious traditions which it champions.
The ground for democracy is, then, to be found in the intrinsic limitations of
the Islamist agenda. Democracy will, however, expand not solely through an
intra-civilizational process centred on the struggle between democratic and
fundamentalist Muslims as they 'make their own decisions and find their own
solutions' (Lewis 1993: 98). The advances or set-backs of the democratic agenda
are registered, in the present conjuncture, in the national arenas which, theor-
etically as well as politically, provide the concrete starting and end points of
analysis. The fate of democracy in the Islamic world is being decided in Egypt,
Iran, Israel/Palestine, Malaysia and elsewhere, but in consequence of processes
involving geo-cultural as well as international and national agencies. The nature
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Ref rami ng Orzentalism 1 1 7
of these processes and the power of t he actors to influence t he outcome vary with
each case. A social science investigation adequate to t he task of understanding
any or all of them entails a multi-level and multi-causal approach that syntheti-
cally overcomes t he polarized reductions witnessed above. This, as I hope to have
shown, is also a Weberian strategy.
Uni versi t y o f Nor t h London
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at t he 1996 Conference of t he
BSA's Weber St udy Group on State, Nationalism and Modernisation. Of the
many friends and colleagues whose views have shaped and improved my argu-
ment, I particularly mention my debt to Ralph Schroeder, the convenor of the
above coaference, for his persistent encouragement and incisive comments.
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