Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present (original) (raw)
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Beyond Edward Said: An Outlook on Postcolonialism and Middle Eastern Studies
Social Epistemology
At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, presented an epistemologico-methodological equation expressed most lucidly by Aimé Césaire, colonization=thingification. Said, arguing against that archaic historicized discourse, Orientalism, was simply postulating that colonialism and its systems of knowledges signified the colonized, in Anouar Abdel-Malek’s words, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Nearly four decades later, Said’s contribution has become tamed and domesticated to an extent that most heterodoxic critical endeavours in the field have become clichéd premeditated anti-Orientalist tirades. At best, these critiques are stuck at analysing the impact of power at the macro-level, polemically regurgitating jargons like “hegemony”, “misrepresentation” and “Otherness”. At worst, they have become dogmatic or ethnocentric, closing space for scholarly debate through insipid cultural relativism, pathological religiosity or pernicious Occidentalism. I argue there is a need to go beyond that old postcolonial epistemological equation through examining the follow on effects of thingification on the thingified subject’s Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I aim to undertake this critical endeavour through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit programme of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a cognitive schema and a grammar of action that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, I demonstrate that imperial enthusiasts in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions, from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’, draw on a number of Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thoughts, which I argue are responsible for re-interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance. In the process, I put forward a new post-Saidian equation that not only transcends that tried and tested scholarly narrative, but a formula much better suited for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of neocolonial power that aims to negate the negating act: Colonization= thingification + re-interpellation of subjectivity.
Parameters of a Postcolonial Sociology of the Ottoman Empire
Political Power and Social Theory, 2013
The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such
Reorientalizing the Middle East: The Power Agenda Setting Post-Arab Uprisings
Claims to new or critical knowledge can often be non-performative. Building off of this assumption, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the 2010-2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa have been analysed through approaches that claim to be critical and post-Orientalist and yet reproduce problematic assumptions about the region, revealing their connection to a longer genealogy dating back to Orientalism. This serves to sanitize the uprisings by virtue of a neoliberal agenda that reproduces the ‘Middle East’ straitjacket, in turn creating a typology not too different from realist analysis in the region that (re)posits ‘Arab exceptionalism.’ Claims to being critical, or making a critical turn, are thus questioned in this paper through an analysis that shows how theory has been in the interest of power through the appropriation of native informants into the academic complex of think-tanks, Western donor institutions, and foreign media. Taking our cue from Edward Said, we explore how new approaches have presented themselves as critical and have disrobed themselves of their exotic and explicit racist discourse, despite the fact that the same assumptions continue to lurk in the background. Using Sara Ahmed’s notion of the non-performativity of claims to being critical, we survey how the Middle East is being reshaped through these ‘new’ and ‘critical’ approaches that in essence are apologetic to neoliberalism and liberal governmentality at large. We show how minorities continue to be an intervention mechanism under the so-called ‘freedom of belief’ agenda, how the ‘democracy paradigm’ advances electoralism as freedom, and how rights-based approaches with their underlying (neo)liberal assumptions continue to determine gender politics and analysis despite postcolonial interventions. By creating a contemporary genealogy of Middle East area studies and surveying calls for proposals for journal articles, media publications, Western think-tank reports, donor programs and Civil Society Organizations' (CSOs) expansion into the Middle East, this paper argues that this form of surveillance, though masquerading as ‘critical,’ builds off of neoliberal governmentality. This, in turn, molds a subjectivity that reifies the Middle East as a stagnant entity.
On Saidian Postcolonialism: The Middle East between Culture, Capital and Class
Critique , 2019
The Middle East finds itself plagued by imperial and civil wars, capital ravaging and plundering its societies, dictatorships and plutocracies, the migration catastrophe, ecological crises, the rise of various forms of fundamentalism and unimaginable poverty and inequality. Yet, today we find that, to borrow from Marx, the ‘arm of criticism’ has been hijacked by a cohort of postmodern-postcolonialist Saidians, who are unwilling or unable to provide an appropriate prognosis for these fundamental political and economic problems. Moved by cultural relativism, identitarianism, pathological religiosity, ad hominem logicality and postmodern epistemological nihilism, this epistemico-political faction has redirected scholarly critique in the region from an examination of class and private property to identity politics. Fetishising ‘alterity’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘Otherness’, dismissing the idea of a radical-truth that links the particular to the universal and impossibilizing a world beyond capital and the state, this worldview whilst always radical in tone manufactures a set of domesticated and interpellated subjectivities. Following the tradition of radical emancipatory and egalitarian positions of European and ‘Third World’ thinkers, this paper argues for a return to revolutionary universal politics
(2016) Thinking postcolonially about the Middle East: Two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique
Present day insecurities in the Middle East are invariably analysed in light of the colonial past. Yet, Eurocentrism, which is a by-product of the coloniser's orientalist gaze toward the non-European world, continues to shape our understanding of regional dynamics. This paper suggests that thinking postcolonially about the Middle East has two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique. Often-times, attempts at thinking postcolonially about the Middle East remain content with the first moment (admitting the ills of colonialism) and not realise the second moment (studying the Middle East as the 'constitutive outside' of 'Eu-rope', thereby acknowledging mutually constitutive relations). The first section of the paper introduces the notion of thinking postcolonially about the international. Next, I distinguish between what I term as 'two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique' and illustrate the difference by looking at the figures of the English traveller and author Gertrude Bell, a.k.a. 'the woman who made Iraq', and Iraqi architect Dame Zaha Hadid who embodied the Middle East as a 'constitutive outside' of Europe.
Comparative Legal History, 2014
Professor Darling's account of social justice and political power in the Middle East is first and foremost a cultural account. As such, it constitutes a major contribution to recent scholarly attempts at conceiving of and capturing Middle Eastern political and legal traditions regionally rather than religiously. 1 Without neglecting the Islamic dimension of Middle Eastern political culture, the author embarks on a long journey that traces the political and economic relation between Middle Eastern states and their societies from the third millennium BCE to the twentieth century. Her account relies primarily on an ancient Middle Eastern political concept that acquired its name during the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, but the roots of which can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern texts: the Circle of Justice.
Comparative Legal History, 2014
Professor Darling's account of social justice and political power in the Middle East is first and foremost a cultural account. As such, it constitutes a major contribution to recent scholarly attempts at conceiving of and capturing Middle Eastern political and legal traditions regionally rather than religiously. 1 Without neglecting the Islamic dimension of Middle Eastern political culture, the author embarks on a long journey that traces the political and economic relation between Middle Eastern states and their societies from the third millennium BCE to the twentieth century. Her account relies primarily on an ancient Middle Eastern political concept that acquired its name during the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, but the roots of which can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern texts: the Circle of Justice.