Wael Hallaq’s new book is the most recent contribution to the vast literature on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), as well as the latest attempt to respond to and push beyond Said’s groundbreaking critique. A renowned scholar of Islamic law, Hallaq comes to the present project from within the field of Orientalism itself, “having written in and about it for nearly four decades” (p. ix). Ambitious and sweeping in its scope, this project involves nothing less than a complete overhaul of Western modernity and the liberal values upon which it rests—values that are here held responsible for a host of ills that plague our contemporary world: from “colossal environmental destruction” and “indecent disparity between rich and poor” to “massive colonialist and imperialist atrocities and dehumanization” (p. 232). The true target of the book, then, is not simply Orientalism as a distinct field of academic inquiry. Rather, it is the project of modernity itself, and its epistemological framework, that emerge as the true objects of Hallaq’s “regenerative critique” (p. 25)—a critique that unfolds with ever greater urgency over the course of five wide-ranging chapters.
Expanding his angle of vision beyond the confines of Said’s book, Hallaq flatly rejects standard economic-materialist arguments for the rise of the modern project, according to which both colonizer and colonized contributed to the growth of modernity, albeit in a structurally unequal fashion. Such arguments, Hallaq maintains, cannot account for the unprecedented forms of cruelty with which European colonists exploited, enslaved, dehumanized, and ripped apart the very fabric of life that, prior to their arrival, had sustained generations of Amerindians, Haitians, and countless other peoples and societies. For Hallaq, what enabled such forms of violence was a way of thinking, distinctly modern and exclusively European, that lacks sufficient ethical restraint and places human beings above nature, thereby granting them God-like “dominion” over the entire world. This, according to the author, is what Said’s critique missed.
Hallaq brings out the uniqueness of modernity’s genocidal violence by way of presenting a starkly contrastive, but also overly uncritical, case study of the premodern Islamic world and its paradigmatic thought structures. In what is one of Hallaq’s most fascinating chapters, a chapter that will surely challenge most readers’ stereotypes about Islam, he paints a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a thriving civilization guided by a complex and sophisticated moral “law” (Shari’a) that regulated social and economic relations, and conceived of human beings as custodians of the world, rather than its sovereign masters. As Hallaq presents it, Shari’a was the exact opposite of, and therefore better than, the modern nation-state when it came to the provision of justice, the protection of the weak, and the holding of those in power accountable. When this “hermeneutical, educational, jurisprudential, and cultural system” (p. 82) collapsed under the onslaught of European colonialism and its army of Orientalists, the destruction was irreversible.
Even as Hallaq mourns the loss of what was once a stable ethical order, he recognizes that it is impossible to resurrect classical Islamic law. Still, in the face of a looming ecological catastrophe, he believes that today we stand in dire need of retrieving a way of thinking about the world and the place of human beings in it that we currently lack, but that premodern Islamic cultures possessed: a less destructive attitude toward nature, an appreciation for the sacredness of all life, and an emphasis on ethical self-cultivation. But how might we retrieve a worldview that has been lost? What does it mean to suggest, as Hallaq does, that the proper solution to the crisis of modernity can only be nonmodern? In a gesture that recalls Martin Heidegger’s encounter with the Pre-Socratics and Jonathan Lear’s account of the Crow’s response to the eviscerating effects of U.S. settler colonialism (see Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 2006), Hallaq similarly argues that a return to something from our past—to a way of thinking that we currently consider marginal—might be the only way we have of going forward.
At first glance, Hallaq’s idea of a heuristic retrieval of premodern traditional worldviews (not only Islamic, but also Chinese and Indian) might strike readers as an instance of misguided nostalgia, and a dangerous one at that. But this would only be the case if we were to assume that Hallaq is calling for a literal return to premodern ways of life. It must be emphasized that this is not his goal. Rather, the author’s main concern is to ask whether a modern West might open itself to learning from premodern Others. In this regard, his proposal that a thoroughly restructured and “ethicized” Orientalism can harness the Islamic heritage for purposes of self-critique appears simultaneously bold and paradoxical. For how can an “outside” (premodernity) be used to critique a phenomenon that constitutes our “inside” (modernity)? In turn, how can an inside contain what stands outside it without completely eliminating it? These are the questions that readers are left to ponder as they close the last pages of the book.
Clearly, the author believes that premodernity can provide us with heuristic resources for articulating new ways of thinking about the world and of living in it. However, Hallaq’s central categories need to be questioned. Much of his argument rests on essentializing conceptions of tradition, modernity, the Enlightenment, and “science” that oversimplify phenomena and intellectual currents which, historically, have not always spoken in a unified voice. Few will find his critique of modernity surprising, as similar arguments have been advanced in earlier times by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and members of the Frankfurt school, among others. Because Hallaq relies on a substantialist ontology that leads him to argue from essences, his analysis reproduces the view of a monolithic, all-powerful “West” that is here figured as completely separate and distinct from an equally monolithic but powerless “non-Western” Other. This presentation significantly downplays the extent to which both sides participated in the construction of the modern project, albeit in structurally unequal ways.
Although clearly critical of the West and its colonial violence, there remains an element of Eurocentrism in Hallaq’s analysis (which he does acknowledge) insofar as he fetishizes Western agency and marginalizes the agency of non-Western actors. As such, it seems worthwhile to press the author to consider how a different starting point, one that emphasizes a relational over a substantialist ontology, might affect his overall critique of modernity and his analysis of the interaction between the Western self and the non-Western Other. Had he conceived of the self and Other as differentiated yet overlapping histories, rather than as preformed essences, Hallaq might have been able to extend the same generosity he displays toward premodern cultures to the modern project itself. In turn, this might have allowed him to apply the same spirit of critique he directs toward modernity to his appraisal of premodern ways of life as well.
These comments notwithstanding, Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism has much to recommend it. It is a welcome and much-needed addition to the project of decolonizing the Western academy currently underway across the humanities and social sciences. As such, his book should appeal to a broad audience indeed.
