Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

Role of Intellectuals

      There are important reasons why we should pay close attention to the work of intellectuals in general and the way intellectuals represent Wahhabism in particular. The long and rich scholarly tradition known as the sociology of intellectuals acknowledges that it matters what intellectuals are saying and writing.⁴⁹ Intellectuals writing in newspapers, scholarly journals, online, and in magazines produce a lot of what we think we know and understand to be Wahhabism. Many scholars have acknowledged it is these intellectuals who are producing knowledge in the social world in the form of representations that are informing our judgments and decisions, particularly with regards to foreign policy.⁵⁰ If we want to understand and make sense of some of the information influencing the modern political debate and policy- and decision-making processes regarding Wahhabism, then we must pay some attention to the ways in which intellectuals are representing this phenomenon.

      The contest to define Wahhabism involves intellectuals, commentators, and polemicists from different intellectual and political traditions and frameworks, using different rhetorical techniques, making different claims to truth, and motivated by different ethical, political, and religious considerations. The sites of this contest are numerous and include the scholarly literature, mass media publications like newspapers and magazine articles, and the blogosphere as well. The significance of this intellectual battle becomes readily apparent when we consider the effects intellectuals’ representations of a phenomenon like Wahhabism can have on politicians, public opinion, and policymaking, particularly when these are occurring in a political and social context characterized by heightened anxiety about Islamic terrorism.

      We currently have a situation where a rise in spin has been accompanied by an increased demand on the part of policymakers and governments that are increasingly reliant on evidence when making policy.⁵¹ Both the use of spin and the appeal to evidence rely on Enlightenment assumptions and approaches to securing the conditions of truth: public administrators rely on the rigorous collection of evidence to evaluate their legislative programs and policies, while governments rely on the scientific study of the effects of public relations campaigns.⁵²

      This conjunction has meant that since 2001 we have seen many Western governments rely on the creative presentation of facts or spin as evidence to manipulate public opinion and mobilize support for policies, particularly those involving military invasions of sovereign nations like Afghanistan and Iraq and supporting security and intelligence-gathering measures aimed at protecting Western interests from Islamic terrorism. Certain Western governments intent on pursuing their own political aims and goals have proven to be disingenuous and deceptive and have manipulated and fabricated facts to support their policies. The quintessential example is the intelligence failure inspiring the US-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The US and British governments claimed to have evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the security of the West.⁵³ We now know this was not the case. The result is that we currently have a situation Hannah Arendt first commented on when writing about the politics of the Cold War in the 1960s, in which even factual truths have become open to manipulation.⁵⁴

      What is interesting to me and what helps animate and legitimate this book is the role Western intellectuals representing Wahhabism are playing in the modern political context. I am especially interested in their roles as representatives of particular interest groups keen to promote their beliefs and values. I share this interest with many prominent scholars who have dedicated a lot of time and energy to making sense of the role of intellectuals in the modern political context. This has become known as the sociology of intellectuals tradition.

      This tradition began with groundbreaking work done by Karl Mannheim.⁵⁵ We have since seen an evolving tradition of inquiry and debate between intellectuals as diverse as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, J.P. Nettl, Peter Berger, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Michael Walzer, and Edward Said, all of whom have attempted to say what defines an intellectual and offered guidance on how we are to best understand their social significance.⁵⁶ Some of these writers like Foucault and Said have understood intellectuals as living on the margins or even outside of society, a circumstance warranted by their eternal pursuit of truth and of speaking truth to power.⁵⁷ Others like Habermas have treated intellectuals as critical to the maintenance of a public sphere and to the health of a democratic order.⁵⁸ There are also scholars like Gramsci who treat intellectuals as social animals bound to interest groups that use various ideological apparatuses like the media to help impose and legitimate particular values and beliefs on a society.⁵⁹ The debates about the role of intellectuals that I reprise at length in the next chapter help shape some of the issues I explore in the book.

      The public sphere is also an important concept I refer to numerous times and warrants closer attention. The representations of Wahhabism provided by the intellectuals studied in this book appear in places like mainstream American newspapers, magazines, books, and online. We can categorize these different mediums as belonging to what we call a public sphere. Often when we think about the nature of the public sphere, we think of a community or public acting in a particular space. It is sometimes assumed civil dialogue flourishes in this kind of setting so long as it is free from domination and exclusion. This kind of approach however fails to recognize that communication in public rarely involves widespread and equal participation. We must appreciate the fragmented nature of these spaces, in which there are few who receive attention and many who give it. We must also understand that these spaces are largely comprised of audiences that are generally watching, reading, or observing what is happening.

      Jürgen Habermas is often credited as providing the quintessential notion of the public sphere.⁶⁰ Habermas conceptualizes a public sphere as a place in which critical debate takes place and lists a number of conditions that must be met in order for a space to be categorized as a public sphere: there must be the ability to form a public opinion; all citizens must be granted access; citizens must be free of political and economic controls, therefore allowing them to speak about matters of general interest; and there must be debate about the general rules governing relations. Habermas’s normative account has been extremely influential and is an interesting philosophical idea; however, there are more pragmatic conceptualizations like the one offered by Ari Adut that provide a better and more useful way of understanding this concept.⁶¹

      Adut’s conceptualization of the public sphere fits perfectly with how we can understand representations as working. The idea of access is integral to Adut’s conceptualization, and he describes three ways people are able to attain this. One is to be physically present in the space, for example, when people meet and talk in the street. The second has to do with representational access, meaning that one’s name, image, or words can appear in spaces like newspapers or magazines. Thirdly, we can have sensory access when the contents of the space are made available to our senses.

      The term public sphere implies general access; however, the reality is quite different. Many public spaces have obstacles preventing most of us from being seen or having our opinions heard. This is especially the case when dealing with spaces that tend to receive a lot of publicity. Generally speaking, the more publicity a space receives, the harder it is to be heard or seen. Mainstream US newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are good examples, as a select few contributors are able to publicize their opinions. When dealing with spaces that receive relatively high amounts of publicity, physical access becomes very hard and representational access is highly valued. Nearly anyone can submit an opinion piece to these newspapers, but very few will ever have their articles printed.

      Conversely, forums on websites that encourage inclusivity like 4chan provide examples of spaces that receive relatively less publicity but are easier for people to access. Despite this, few would deny that newspapers like the New York Times form an important part of what we conceptualize as the public sphere. As a space it does not grant general access but it does provide many with sensory access. The public sphere as conceptualized by Adut is thus a generic term denoting all virtual or real spaces, the contents of which obtain general visibility or audibility. Key here is the term ‘virtual,’ which points to the important role