MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 339
value of deconstructing the Suez Crisis is to
notice that, before they happened, the events
actually did not make much sense at all” (p.
321), that inside observers of events were
woefully unable to forecast “unexpected”
outcomes, that “assessments, pleasingly
plausible, were often wrong” and policy
designs, “seemingly well considered, were
not” (p. 323) — across the board.
This finale leaves little hope for any of
the potential crises facing international dip-
lomats in our day, but perhaps will gird read-
ers — presumably including policy-makers
and educated shapers of public opinion
— with an overarching duty to reject fixed
parameters, to treat all parties, whether or
not of sound body and mind, as actors with
their own comprehensible virtual reality, and
to mistrust “intelligence” or allies that vali-
date comfortable preconceptions. I am not
sure that they do not just restate some of the
lessons offered by Miles Copeland, the op-
erative from the Central Intelligence Agency
who used to “play” Nasser in situational exer-
cises, what he called “the game of nations.”4
But it never hurts to be reminded of this; and
the Harvard Team recasts this most important
and enduring crisis in a skillful manner.
As a historian of the era, I am struck by
certain aspects of the story that make me re-
consider its unfolding. It is valuable to see
France and the USSR, frequently late en-
trants into the narrative, given equal billing
in terms of their regional outlook. The Israe-
li-Jordanian border, in particular, emerges
here as a potentially greater threat to region-
al peace, a diversion of attention from the
escalating Israeli-Egyptian tensions. Israel’s
David Ben-Gurion remains ever elusive, at
once dogmatic about Egypt, anticipating war
within the year as inevitable, yet steadfastly
unwilling, at least at the outset, to embark
upon a charade, including a British offer to
stage an Egyptian air attack on the south-
ern city of Beersheba. He remained deeply
suspicious of British ploys to divert Israeli
attention away from its eastern front while
still, two years before the Iraqi revolution,
4. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The
Amorality of Power Politics (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1969).
fantasizing about consolidating a unitary
Hashemite state. I do not think our vision
of Egypt will change much, but it would be
wonderful to be allowed deeper access to an
official record. It is remarkable how the view
of John Foster Dulles (perhaps unduly unfair
initially) has shifted to describe a wily politi-
cian struggling to restrain Eden and to serve
an American president who refused to coun-
tenance war on his watch. In the middle of
the crisis, Dulles believed he had succeeded
in defusing things, yet as Zelikow summa-
rizes, writing in present tense, “He is right
about that, almost” (p. 225).
Details on all of this are available in oth-
er studies that are sourced (a bibliography
would be nice), and they deserve due notice
because as Zelikow and May remind us this
was a moment of historical consequence,
however much it appears to have been, or
perhaps precisely because it may have been
contained. Other moments — Iran 1953 and,
one day, Iraq 2003 — could stand similar
“deconstruction.”
Dr. Joel Gordon, University of Arkansas,
joelg@uark.edu
PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION,
AND SCIENCE
Restating Orientalism: A Critique of
Modern Knowledge, by Wael B. Hallaq.
New York: Columbia University Press,
2018. 380 pages. $40.
Reviewed by Justin Stearns
In Restating Orientalism, a companion
piece to his Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Trans-
formations (Cambridge University Press,
2009) and The Impossible State (Columbia
University Press, 2015), Wael Hallaq has
written a fascinating, tightly argued, polemi-
cal, and ultimately frustrating book. The ar-
gument: Modern knowledge and the modern
academy are rooted in an epistemological
shift that has separated the West from the rest
of world history since the birth of the lim-
ited liability corporation in the 17th century
and the concomitant emergence of Enlight-
340 ✭ MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
enment thought (pp. 16, 36, 185). Here were
the origins of individualism, an arrogance
regarding the universal nature of Europe’s
cultural values, and the driving impulse
to spread them globally that led directly to
colonialism (as seen exemplarily first in the
East India Company and today in Israel), the
essence of which was genocide and environ-
mental destruction (pp. 189, 220–27). Mo-
dernity, with its focus on an individual in a
disenchanted world stands in stark contrast to
the traditional societies that made up the rest
of world history, and especially to Hallaq’s
main counterexample, the precolonial Mus-
lim Middle East (pp. x, 75–77).1 The Islamic
legal system, with its independent financial
basis in pious endowments (awqaf), repre-
sented a sovereign moral system independent
of the ruler’s authority that was not subject
to the Agambian exceptionality of the nation-
state, born in Europe and then spread though
colonialism to the rest of the world (pp. 79–
83). Bereft of the type of moral guidance that
Islamic law had provided — based, instead,
on an anthropocentric sovereignty — the
modern state, both in its European origins
and its later colonial derivatives, offered its
subjects only materialism and the need to
dominate the Other, packaged in a doctrine
of progress (pp. 85, 101–5). Faced with this
predicament, the correct course of action is
to turn to a study of the spiritual richness
of the traditional non-Western world and to
refashion a self that has been alienated by
modernity (pp. x, 240–54). And here, strik-
ingly, is where Orientalism — understood as
the study of the spiritual traditions of Asia,
Africa, and the Americas — is well-placed to
lead the way forward: not as the study of the
Other but as a technology to learn from the
Other and to repair the European self as a first
step of rolling back modernity (pp. 257–67).
Hallaq’s use of Edward Said’s Oriental-
ism (Vintage Books, 1979) is primarily as a
clarifying foil. For Hallaq, Said’s text, which
1. For the argument that this Weberian disen-
chantment never actually took place in Europe,
see Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Dis-
enchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth
of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2017).
became so influential, did not go far enough
in its criticism — it was not just the academic
field of Orientalism that had played a role in
justifying and implementing European colo-
nialism, Orientalism was but one part of mod-
ern knowledge, with the social and natural
sciences playing a similar role (p. 6). Said’s
analysis, which Hallaq acknowledges had
made his own work possible, had been ham-
pered by Said’s inability to free himself from
Enlightenment humanism, his focus on rep-
resentation, his disinterest in the Middle East
itself, his ignoring of the importance of co-
lonialism’s distortion of Islamic law, and his
misreading of Michel Foucault’s theory of the
author (pp. 57, 61, 71, 142). Hallaq’s misgiv-
ings regarding Said are clarified in his exten-
sive discussion of the work of René Guénon,
whom Hallaq uses as a favorable contrast
to Said (pp. 163, 172) and whom he credits
as having articulated one of the most astute
critiques of modern knowledge in the 20th
century (pp. 142–62). Guénon may initially
be a surprising figure for Hallaq to use as a
paradigm for intellectual engagement, but his
inclusion in the analysis clarifies a good deal
about the aim of Restating Orientalism.
Guénon was the 20th century’s most
important proponent of the doctrine of pe-
rennial philosophy, in which each of the
world’s major religious traditions is seen
to possess a spiritual truth that needs to be
accessed through initiation into a specific
tradition. While traditionalism of the kind
that he argued for did not bear a single in-
terpretation, his critique of Western moder-
nity and his influence on a whole generation
of scholars — including Frithjof Schuon,
Martin Lings, Mircea Eliade, and Seyyed
Hossein Nasr — was profound.2 The neces-
2. See Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern
World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual
History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2004). Sedgwick’s read-
ing of Hossein Nasr should be supplemented by
Rosemary R. Hicks, “Comparative Religion and
the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian
‘Mysticism’ into Liberal Islamic Modernity,” in
Secularism and Religion Making, ed. Markus
Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–69.

sary spiritual renewal of the modern subject
that Hallaq invokes is quite close to that ad-
vocated by Guénon, although it is not clear
to what extent Hallaq wishes to associate
himself with perennialism, however much
Orientalism Restated overlaps with it in its
indictment of modernity. Indeed, Hallaq’s
redefinition of the Orient as the non-Western
world in possession of spiritual traditions
necessary for the refashioning of the mod-
ern subject (pp. 243–46) supports a reading
of it as a perennialist critique that draws on,
among others, Thomas Kuhn, Carl Schmitt,
Giorgio Agamben, Foucault, Patrick Wolfe,
and John Gray. Restating Orientalism cer-
tainly aligns with perennialism in its strong
rejection of secular humanism and the need
to refashion the self with intense study of a
traditional religious or spiritual path (Islam
being the primary one presented here).
There are several areas in which Hallaq’s
analysis departs from previous traditionalist
criticisms of Western modernity, the primary
one being the importance he gives to law
(pp. 112–21; although this is hardly surpris-
ing considering his previous writings). The
focus on law as the essence of Islamic mo-
rality and the bulwark of Islamic spirituality
is worth noting considering how influential
recent discussions of Islam have argued
against an earlier Orientalist fixation on law
as metonymically standing in for Islam itself
and for a greater consideration of the role of
Sufism as being equally characteristic of Is-
lamic civilization.3 Sufism receives little dis-
cussion in Restating Orientalism, although
Hallaq repeatedly sets it next to the shari‘a
as the twin moral systems that shaped the
premodern Muslim self (p. 83).
For readers already sympathetic to Hal-
laq’s criticisms of the moral vacuity of mo-
dernity and its corrosive influence on the self,
Restating Orientalism may provide them
with a theoretical nuanced understanding of
the exceptionally negative role of European
3. See Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Im-
portance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 2016); Thomas Bauer, Die
Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte
des Islams [The Culture of Ambiguity: An Alterna-
tive History of Islam] (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2011).
MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 341
rationality in world history. For those not al-
ready sharing his belief (and even for some
who do) that modernity and modern states
create citizens lacking ethical formation (p.
105), the genealogy he sketches may be less
convincing, and his conflation of Enlighten-
ment philosophy, the rise of modern science,
the emergence of the nation-state, and Eu-
ropean colonialism is simplistic. They may
similarly question his claim that there was
something particular about European Christi-
anity that distinguished it from other spiritual
traditions and that laid the groundwork for
later European justifications for environmen-
tal destruction (pp. 87–89, 99). Still, I believe
that most readers of Restating Orientalism
will find their interpretations of Orientalism
challenged, will be provoked to question
assumptions small and large, and will be
pushed to justify their own understandings of
modern knowledge and its genealogies.
Justin Stearns, Associate Professor, Arab
Crossroads Studies, NYU Abu Dhabi
SOCIOECONOMIC
CONDITIONS
Demography and Democracy: Transi-
tions in the Middle East and North
Africa, by Elhum Haghighat, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2018. 261
pages. $99.99 cloth; $22.17 paper; $20.20
Kindle.
Reviewed by Paul Puschmann
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the
Middle East and North Africa have turned
into the world’s deadliest conflict zone. Due
to the civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and
Yemen, and the rise of the co-called Islamic
State, hundreds of thousands of civilians
have died, and millions have been forced
to take refuge, mostly in neighboring coun-
tries. The flow of refugees has caused enor-
mous challenges to international aid orga-
nizations and has put serious pressure on
governments of refugee-hosting countries,
such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. If we
add to this the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict,
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