Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

see that the relatively new interest in it is related to the post-9/11 period in which many Western governments and intellectuals are living during a time of heightened anxiety about radical Islamism and are fixated with the Western-led global war on terror.

      Given the important roles intellectuals play in this knowledge-producing process, it matters that we pay close attention to the particular truth claims intellectuals make when justifying their interpretations and think about how we are best to understand this process. As has proven to be the case in recent times, if we are going to make policies informed and supported by these truth claims, it matters that we fully understand them. If Western nations are going to invade sovereign Islamic nations in the Middle East with the aim of promoting democracy, or bomb civilians and terrorists in the name of security then we must have an understanding of the claims supporting and justifying these kinds of actions. This understanding requires intense scrutiny that involves the careful deconstructing of representations.

      I dedicate this chapter to setting out the rationale for my book. I argue that a review of the relevant literature points to a number of key problems or questions that have been the focus of considerable scholarly debate. These problems or questions provide the overarching intellectual and analytical problematic for my inquiry into the ways certain groups of intellectuals represent Wahhabism. First, it is clear there is an ongoing debate about the motivation and identity of intellectuals. I show how scholars have sought to make sense of the different motivations and inspirations influencing intellectuals. I aim to answer the question, what is it that leads some to become intellectuals? Related to this idea is how we define an intellectual. Here I ask, is the function of critique fundamental to the identity of intellectuals? Secondly, there is a discussion about the particular practices in which intellectuals play a special role. How important is the proposition that intellectuals set about constituting our world? This leads me to consider their role in constructing what Anderson called ‘Imagined communities’ and Said called ‘Imagined geographies.’¹⁵ Among the many issues about the relationship of intellectuals to conceptions of truth, I deal with the role prejudice plays in the ways intellectuals make sense of and represent the social world. The need to do this is raised by Chomsky’s provocative suggestion that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies and Arendt’s more nuanced account of the problem of how we are to think about the relation between truth and politics.¹⁶ At stake here is how some intellectuals justify their claims as purveyors of truth.

On the Collective Identity and Attachment of Intellectuals

      Scholars differ in their understandings with regards to what defines or constitutes an intellectual, what their roles are and should be, and to whom or what they owe their allegiance. Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens offer a useful typology that distinguishes between three major approaches scholars adopt when considering these different issues. These are intellectuals as class-less, intellectuals as class-bound, and intellectuals as a class in themselves.¹⁷ I prefer to think of and describe the second category of intellectuals as class, group, or movement-bound; for me, class-bound implies a Marxist or quasi-Marxist understanding, while class, group, or movement-bound can be used to describe intellectuals with any affiliation to an interest group. Understanding this debate is important because it informs our understanding of and helps us to distinguish between the different roles intellectuals adopt when representing Wahhabism. More specifically this helps us to understand the different factors inspiring and motivating intellectuals in their representations of Wahhabism: are they motivated and inspired by a desire to speak truth to power or by particular class and group interests?

      First we will deal with the group Kurzman and Owens call the class-less intellectuals. Prominent writers belonging to this long tradition include Karl Mannheim, Noam Chomsky, Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and Christopher Hitchens.¹⁸ As the term suggests, these scholars maintain that intellectuals are nonpartisan and not attached or fixed to any particular group or class. Their critiques of the social world for their audience are inspired by utopian ideals, rather than personal glory or class interests. If we are to consider the roles these kinds of intellectuals play in representing Wahhabism, we can say they are motivated and inspired by bringing attention to perceived injustices and wrongs with the ultimate aim of creating a more harmonious society.

      Mannheim saw intellectuals as “not too firmly situated in the social order,” “socially unattached,” and as a part of an “unanchored, relatively class-less stratum.”¹⁹He believed intellectuals to be motivated and inspired by a desire to encourage mutual understanding between different sections and groups in society or as he puts it, “to create a form outside of the party schools in which the perspective of and the interest in the whole is safeguarded.”²⁰ He believed intellectuals were entrusted with the responsibility of making sense of the current political situation for society and he saw nonintellectuals as those members of society who are firmly entrenched and participating in everyday activities. Mannheim believed that the common person, due to their relative lack of education, was incapable of having a deeper understanding of the different political forces operating and competing in society. He believed the common person absorbed a worldview as if by osmosis, “while the person who is not oriented toward the whole through his education, but rather participates directly in the social process of production, merely tends to absorb the Weltanschauung [worldview] of that particular group.”²¹

      Mannheim, however, was extremely worried that intellectuals in the twentieth century were not living up to their responsibilities and were instead promoting the interests of particular groups, to the detriment of wider society. Chomsky expresses a similar concern about intellectuals, especially Western intellectuals in the twenty-first century whose relative “political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression” means they have the responsibility “to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”²²