Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

it their mission to ‘reveal’ to the world the hate and violence promoted in Saudi textbooks. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, MEMRI has consistently published “special dispatches” claiming that Saudi textbooks are portraying Jews as animals and eternal enemies of Muslims.¹⁸ MEMRI claims Saudi textbooks are inciting violence towards Jews and are encouraging its readers to understand the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a microcosm of an overarching war between Muslims and Jews.¹⁹ MEMRI TV has also documented the global spreading of these Wahhabi-infused textbooks, showing for example teachers using Saudi Education Ministry textbooks in remote villages in Africa.²⁰

      Since 9/11 MEMRI has gained public prominence for its news and analysis of events in the Muslim world. It distributes its reports and translations to members of the US Congress, policymakers, journalists, and academics and its articles have been routinely cited in the US mainstream media, including the New York Times and Washington Post. MEMRI claims to be independent, nonpartisan, and not-for-profit. Critics have accused it of having a pro-Israeli bias, deliberately misleading readers, especially with regards to translations of Arabic texts, and highlighted its links to the neoconservative movement.²¹

      Neither Doumato nor Prokop, whose representations of Wahhabism rely on translating Saudi textbooks, are Marxist intellectuals. However, their studies certainly parallel arguments made by prominent Marxist scholars like Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci that education is a key ideological apparatus able to be used to impose particular beliefs and values on a society.²² Doumato’s understanding of Wahhabism is primarily based on her interpretation and analysis of religious texts produced by the Saudi state and prescribed for Saudi students in grades 9 through 12. She finds that these texts have the ability to promote hostility against non-Muslims, encourage exclusivity among Muslims, and inspire violent jihad. Doumato writes:

      Hostile messages there are, but the mood of these texts is less hostile than overwhelmingly defensive. . . . They claw with self-doubt, conjuring up enemies, real and perceived, who are not only at the gates but inside themselves. Looking at the texts alone, the message in the religion curriculum is that “we Muslims are under siege, and it is the duty of every single one of us to man the barricades.”²³ [emphasis added]

      Like Doumato, Prokop’s representation of Wahhabism in part relies on her English translation of Arabic religious texts used in the Saudi education system, which she claims are “heavily influenced by the Wahhabi ideology.”²⁴ Prokop’s analysis is focused on school textbooks for secondary school grades 1 through 3. She posits that there could be a link between Wahhabism and violence. She also claims these texts occasionally promote intolerance and sometimes incite hatred. However, they are often coupled with contradictory messages about peace and tolerance between people of different faiths. Prokop writes:

      The content of the official textbooks is heavily influenced by the Wahhabi ideology. Teaching about the ‘others’—other cultures, ideologies and religions, or adherents of other Muslim schools of jurisprudence or sects—reflects the Wahhabi view of a world divided into the believers and preservers of the true faith and the kuffar, the unbelievers. The teachings about other religions, particularly those pertaining to the ‘People of the Book’, Christians and Jews, are contradictory. While some passages denounce Christians and Jews clearly as unbelievers, people whom one should not greet with salutations of peace or take as friends, or against whom jihad should be waged, other passages stress the peaceful nature of Islam.²⁵

      Both Doumato and Prokop rely on translations from Arabic texts. Before accepting their representations of Wahhabism on face value, it is important to note that the translation process is far from an exact science and that both authors are unable to achieve equivalence in their translations. Martin Müller points out that translation is too often treated as a process in which a translator assumes a neutral relay role producing an objective outcome.²⁶ This is an issue affecting many social science researchers subscribing to Enlightenment and religious ideas of truth when making sense of phenomena in the social world. As John Caputo points out, we no longer live in an age where one story can explain everything that happens in the social world.²⁷

      Müller has these ideas about truth and objectivity in mind when he writes that “if we are to take seriously the problems of representation and speaking for/with others,” then “we are called on to problematize translation as a political act.”²⁸ Recognizing translation as a political act is integral to recognizing the antagonisms and struggles for meaning taking place in a foreign language. We must remember the observer-dependent roles intellectuals play when representing social phenomena like Wahhabism when we consider Müller’s claim that “increased attention to the political implications of translation also spells out the case for broaching the translating geographer as an active agent who molds the production of meaning.”²⁹

      These concerns about translation have preoccupied many scholars, including Müller, H.P. Phillips, Pamela Shurmer-Smith, Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, Bogusia Temple, and Alys Young, all of whom identify equivalence as a key issue.³⁰ Phillips notes that achieving equivalence in translation is an intractable problem given “almost any utterance in any language carries with it a set of assumptions, feelings, and values that the speaker may or may not be aware of” and that the transferring of meaning from one language into another can only ever be partial and never complete.³¹ Different languages structure the world in different ways and translations are never able to completely convey the richness of connotations. Müller points out that this is especially the case when translating “god words.”³²

      There are a number of problems shadowing Doumato’s representation. First is the problem of establishing the basis for her claim to have an objective or literalist way of translating texts. This seems especially problematic when it comes to capturing the “mood” (as Doumato claims to do) of the texts.³³ Many scholars could analyze the same texts and provide very different interpretations, especially when it comes to capturing something so diffuse as mood. Second, we can neither assume that Saudi students will uncritically accept what is presented to them in the school texts nor can we be sure they will act on these hostile ideas. Each student is influenced by their own ways of making sense of the world into which they have been thrown. Indeed, Doumato acknowledges that students can receive conflicting information from a wide variety of sources: “In thinking about what students learn we also have to think about how or whether lessons taught in schools are reinforced outside of school, in the public media, in the mosque, or in the family.”³⁴

      Like Althusser, Gramsci, and Doumato, Prokop recognizes school education is only one element of a society’s ideological apparatus that can be used to promote and impose a particular value and belief system. Prokop writes:

      Formal education is only one element in shaping an individual’s perspective and religious inclinations. The perception of Saudi students is also shaped to an equal if not greater degree by informal teachings in mosques, in homes and through the new media. The mosque is particularly important for the older generation since adult illiteracy rates remain high. Additionally, the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’—contextual factors, such as teacher personality, prevailing classroom dynamics, social background or place of residence—also determine how the message is received and interpreted.³⁵

      With so many qualifications it is hard to be convinced that Prokop’s analysis clearly demonstrates a link between the Saudi school curriculum and violence and terrorism. In this case, the truth claim rests on a premise that there are secure, technical, and methodical paths to be taken so as to arrive at the truth. We must also keep these considerations in mind when reading intellectuals providing less critical, softer, or positive portraits of Wahhabism. I will now turn my attention to focusing on some of these kinds of representations.

Wahhabism Is Not So Bad After All

      There are many scholars who have made a case for a quite different representation of Wahhabism. Juan Cole is one such scholar, defending it against the common claim that it is responsible for inspiring modern Islamic terrorism.³⁶