At this stage I want to present some of the major ways scholars influenced by a variety of political and religious beliefs, aims, and goals have represented Wahhabism. I will continue to expand on this contest throughout the book, particularly when I take a closer look at how intellectuals from the liberal and neoconservative traditions have represented Wahhabism. Now I want to demonstrate that there is little consensus among those writers and researchers dealing with Wahhabism with what might be thought to be the kind of scholarly regard for careful, nuanced inquiry found in academic centers devoted to the study of religions, contemporary political science, or international relations. While some would see this as the basis for resolving the controversies and issues this survey highlights, by appealing to some empirical or theoretical benchmarks of objectivity or accuracy, I continue to hold that this is impossible given that Wahhabism is an observer-dependent phenomenon with no objective reality. The following analyses provide for a great starting point for why we need to pay more attention to the issues of how and why intellectuals represent a phenomenon like Wahhabism in different ways.
I have taken exemplars of some of the ways scholars have dealt with Wahhabism. These representations appear in books in libraries and online and in academic journals, and are often regurgitated or referred to by writers, bloggers, and government officials around the world. These representations are also influencing students, other scholars, and researchers. My analysis begins with a group of scholars emphasizing the negative and dangerous aspects of Wahhabism, which is certainly the dominant representation, and then turns to those offering softer and less threatening portraits. In both cases there are important issues involved in translating Wahhabism that I explore in greater detail toward the end of the chapter. While these issues of translation are important for those seeking to make sense of the contest to define Wahhabism, they also have a much wider application.
Intellectuals, Imagined Geographies, and Imagined Communities: Wahhabism as a Threat
Benedict Anderson’s famous account of the role played by intellectuals in constructing Imagined communities and Edward Said’s Imagined geographies are pertinent ideas when considering how intellectuals like Dore Gold, Bernard Lewis, and David Commins represent Wahhabism.2 Each, albeit in different ways, draws on an historical account of a relationship between spaces and people to arrive at distinctly negative portraits of Wahhabism. Ron Eyerman’s claims that intellectuals are often projecting their own “needs and fantasies” and their “deep-seated needs and interests” are certainly relevant here.3
Anderson makes the point that all “communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact . . . are imagined.”4 Imagined communities are not unreal by virtue of being imagined, but instead constitute a network of socially consequential relationships with the same degree of reality as members of communities enjoying face-to-face relations. We may not see everyone that is a part of our Imagined community; however, our ability to communicate helps us to know they exist. Intellectuals play key roles in this communication process. Anderson points to the crucial role print media plays in creating these communities, highlighting the first European nation-states as quintessential examples. Said’s ideas about Imagined geographies are similar to Anderson’s.
Said uses this term when referring to perceived spaces created by intellectuals through the use of particular images, texts, and discourses.5 His ideas are based on his analysis of the ways in which those in the West have created Imagined geographies of the Orient. He claims that Western culture’s modern understanding of the Orient is based on a selective imagination conjured up through intellectual representations, including academic Oriental studies and travel writings. Said claims that intellectuals’ representations have feminized the Orient by portraying it as open and virgin space with no concept of organized rule or government. The intellectual’s ability to create these Imagined geographies serves as a powerful tool that can be used to control and subordinate the Other. The Other is a term I use throughout the book and it refers to that which is alien and divergent from that which is given, such as a norm, identity, or the self. Its binary is the Same. The constitutive Other often denotes a different, incomprehensible self outside of one’s own. It is a concept that is key to Said’s work on Orientalism.
Dore Gold’s popular representation of Wahhabism is a good example of an intellectual creating an Imagined community. His representation is worth considering given his book, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.6 Published soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it is unsurprising that his book was so popular given the widespread anger and the need of many to find answers or assign blame for the rise in Islamic terrorism and its focus on Western targets. It should also be noted that the US-born Gold is a prominent intellectual that has served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, as an advisor to Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, and is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He also testified as an expert before the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, claiming Saudi Arabia provides ideological and financial support for Islamic terrorist groups and organizations.7
Gold is one of the authors whose representations I first read when researching the Israeli–Palestinian conflict following my discussions with my Palestinian friend in Stockholm. His views and his book are widely cited. He is one of those authors who uses representations of Wahhabism, which he understands as responsible for inspiring and promoting Islamic terrorism, when writing about this conflict. Gold creates an Imagined community in which the West, particularly the United States and Israel, belong, and Palestinians and other supposed terrorist groups and organizations do not. Additionally, he creates an Imagined community of Jewish Israelis in the state of Israel (which he sees as encompassing what many others would deem Palestinian land), of which Palestinians are not a part. A firm supporter of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories, Gold uses representations of Wahhabism in an attempt to explain Palestinian aggression toward Israel.
Assuming the land in question belongs to Israel and rejecting Palestinian claims, Gold has a rationale for looking for alternative explanations for what he sees as a long history of pro-Palestinian terrorism directed against Israel. Dismissing claims that pro-Palestinian groups could be motivated by political and/or economic aims and goals, for example, wanting a functional economy and Palestinian statehood, Gold finds that religion, specifically radical Islam and more specifically Wahhabism, is to blame for inspiring and motivating anti-Israeli violence. Gold’s blaming of religion in general is evident in the following extract:
The United States and its allies can win the most spectacular military victories in Afghanistan; they can freeze terrorists’ bank accounts and cut off their supplies of weaponry; they can eliminate terrorist masterminds. But even taken together, such triumphs are not enough to remove the terrorist threat, for they do not get at the source of the problem. Terrorism, on the scale of the September 11 attacks, does not occur in a vacuum. People do not just decide spontaneously that they are going to hijack an aircraft, crash it into a building, and commit mass murder (and take their own lives) because of some political grievance or sense of economic deprivation. No, there is another critical component of terrorism that has generally been overlooked in the West: the ideological motivation to slaughter thousands of innocent people.8
Contrary to what Gold claims, history shows us that political grievances have certainly motivated many hijackings and other forms of violence. As a firm supporter of Israel, Gold does his best to convince readers that Palestinian violence is religiously motivated and that many pro-Palestinian groups are getting their inspiration from the radical Wahhabi ideology exported from Saudi Arabia.
David Commins, who is a prominent scholar and whose book, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, appears on bookshelves around the world, also provides a representation of Wahhabism worth closely considering.9 A professor of history, Commins provides a good example of an intellectual using Wahhabism to create an Imagined geography. Throughout his book Commins represents Wahhabism as a religion for backward, uncivilized,