Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis
then, representations have been the focus of study for modern philosophers like Ernst Cassirer.4 These studies have tended to understand man to be homo symbolicum, or a representational animal, treating him as a creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs, which are understood as things that stand for or take the place of something else.5 As I will detail later, representations are also important elements of political theory. Political theorists have focused on them since at least the eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke sought to deal with the reccurring question about the relation between aesthetic or semiotic representation (things that stand for other things) and political representation (people who act for others).6
W.J.T. Mitchell offers a useful way of thinking about representations. He says we should think of a representation as a triangular relation of something or someone, by something or someone, and to someone. It is only the third part that must be a person. In light of this, Wahhabism can be understood as a representation of something, by an author and to an audience. Aristotle wrote that representations differ from one another according to object, manner, and means.7 The object is that which is represented, the manner is the way in which it is represented, and the means is the material used. In this study the object is Wahhabism, the manner is the ways in which intellectuals use language to represent it, and the document, for example, the newspaper article, magazine story, or online publication, is the means.
Authors are also able to use language in different ways to help achieve their desired outcomes. They can use particular rhetorical techniques like analogies, metaphorical language, similes, and neologisms. They can also construct violent accounts in such ways that help persuade the reader to either condemn or condone particular acts of violence. Another focus of this book is understanding how intellectuals use these particular rhetorical techniques to help achieve their intended aims.
It is also important that we have a deeper understanding of the relation between the representational material and that which it represents. Semioticians typically differentiate between three kinds of representational relationships: icon, symbol, and index.8 It is the symbolic representation that is pertinent to this book. Symbols tend to be based on arbitrary stipulation rather than their resemblance to the thing signified. Authors representing Wahhabism use text to stand in for what they believe Wahhabism to be, and then many of us as (uncritical) readers agree to regard it in this way. Representation in language is symbolic in that letters, words, and texts can represent states of affairs without actually resembling the situation. We are, as Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out, simply playing language games.9
Ian Hacking is among the authors to have raised some important questions when it comes to studying representations.10 He encourages us to consider whether we are explicitly or implicitly denying the existence of the natural world and if we are ignoring the possibility that some representations of the world are better than others. When I say that Wahhabism is an observer-dependent phenomenon represented by an author to an audience, what I mean is that the experience of Wahhabism in the social world comes into existence when categories are created for it, and these categories are shaped by authors with differing prejudices operating in different social and cultural contexts. As we will see, the variability in representations of Wahhabism across time and space (between intellectuals belonging to different traditions) helps illustrate this. Pursuing this line of reasoning provides for powerful insights into the cultural fabric pertaining to the construction of Wahhabism.
It is important that I state that I am neither denying that an observer-independent reality exists in the natural world nor am I asserting that everything is socially constructed. In terms of my ontological and epistemological approach I accept that a reality does exist and my interest is in how people make sense of it. My work does not decide which representations of Wahhabism are more truthful or better; rather I offer a critique of the different truth claims authors rely on when representing Wahhabism. Just as is the case with Hacking’s work on ‘making up people,’ in which he argues that creating classifications like ‘fugue’ creates new ways to be a person, the ideas motivating my study of representations are that authors’ conceptions of the phenomenon of Wahhabism shape both the ways in which we respond to it and treat the people and groups we ascribe as belonging to it.11
Representations have indeed been the source of much scholarly debate, especially in the field of literature, and have drawn the attention of preeminent thinkers like Plato. He accepted the common view that literature is a representation of life and for that reason he believed it should be banished from the state. He understood representations as substitutes for the things themselves or, even more worryingly, as false or illusory substitutes having the ability to inspire antisocial emotions among people.12 The only representations allowed to exist in Plato’s republic of rational virtue were those carefully picked and controlled by the state.13 If we look at the situation in the world today we can see that many states think and act in the same way; however, the emergence of new social media continues to challenge this control.
Wahhabism means very different things to different people, which is a point that has been accepted by some better studies and which will become clearer throughout this book.14 Wahhabism is in effect a deeply contested category, and I now want to introduce the reader to this contest that is taking place.
Wahhabism: A Contested Category
Wahhabism is conventionally and popularly understood to be a conservative version of Islam originating in Saudi Arabia, where it has a substantial following.15 Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab is considered to be the founder of this tradition, which played a decisive role in creating the modern Saudi state in 1932.16 The widely accepted story as recounted by Western commentators in particular is that Abd al-Wahhab, a scholar from the Najd region in what is now Saudi Arabia, was intent on promoting his understanding of monotheism to a self-identifying Muslim populace he believed to be polytheists worshiping a corrupted version of Islam.17 Born somewhere between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Abd al-Wahhab is said to have traveled to Muslim lands beyond his native Najd in the early 1800s, where he witnessed what he understood to be a laxity of conduct with regards to the practice of Islam.18 W.F. Smalley noted that Abd al-Wahhab “returned home, a prophet with a message . . . that the world had gone mad. It had become polytheistic. . . . Islam had wandered far from the principals of Mohammed.”19 It is said that Abd al-Wahhab was particularly incensed by Muslims using the rosary, dressing in expensive attire, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, visiting shrines of dead Muslims, and debating the nature of God.20
Returning to his homeland a few years later with the aim of reforming Islam as it was practiced in the Najd region, Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas made him unwelcome in his home city and he fled to the nearby city of Deraiyah, where he teamed up with a local leader, Muhammad Ibn Saud (from the now (in)famous Sa‘ud family), who had his own political ambitions. The deal between the two, recounted by many Western scholars, was that they would unite the warring towns, villages, and tribes in the region under a government where Abd al-Wahhab could enforce his strict interpretation of Islam and Ibn Saud would be appointed the political ruler.21
Ultimately they were able to achieve their desire for religious and political control through both ideological subversion and military might, the latter supplied by fierce local Bedouin warriors commonly referred to as the Ikhwan.22 While their rebellion against the Ottoman rule in Arabia was put down in 1818, the Wahhabi rebellions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ultimately proved successful in uniting the tribes of Najd and forming what would become the modern Saudi state.23 It is said that the Ikhwan were seduced by this new religious identity they believed would allow the Bedouin in the region to unite and fight under the common banner of Islam, rather than continually fighting each other.24 Their violent energies were channeled away from killing each other and instead focused on people in neighboring lands who did not share the religious vision promoted by Abd al-Wahhab. Joseph Kostiner explains that “according to the typical portrait, the Ikhwan were bold fighters, fanatical and absolutely devoted to their country and to the spread of Wahhabi tenets.”25