Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

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