Scholars in the Empire: Sketching a Framework for Understanding

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا فِي قَرْيَةٍ مِنْ نَذِيرٍ إِلَّا قَالَ مُتْرَفُوهَا إِنَّا بِمَا أُرْسِلْتُمْ بِهِ كَافِرُونَ

Never did we send a warner to a population, but the wealthy ones among them said: "We believe not in the (Message) with which ye have been sent."

Sura Saba (34:34)

This verse made me stop and re-read it. It struck me with the force of electric shock actually. NEVER, says the Qu'ran, was there a message of truth sent down in which the rich and established ones didn't say, "Naw, that can't be true, and anyway, its not for us." NEVER.

Revolutionary knowledge such as that brought by the Qu'ran, is always a threat to established authorities. Even scholarly authorities (kinda ironic, given the way US development dollars and oil revenue are the engines fueling how the Saudi discourse of Islam dominates Islamic education, Islamic publishing, and the production of Islamic knowledge)

The role of the scholar is to be a witness against imperial projects. Scholars deny their calling if they avoid speaking against totalitarianism, fascism, colonialism, and all forms of immoral societal control. The modern empire—transnational, transcapital, and transformational—is a fusion of older imperial projects with the newest technology and techniques available for social control. Our understanding of empire has broadened. Although the image may still conjure up Darth Vader and authoritarian regimes with power over vast stretches of territory, today’s real empire—i.e. those who exercise true ‘imperial perogatives’ over the globe, are not always openly tied to projects of police repression, military might, and a developed ‘center’. Centers and peripheries are ever-shifting and there are smaller peripheries within larger geographical units representing the center. The beast has more than one belly! Today’s empire may condemn police tactics on the periphery because the center has been so thoroughly pacified. Today's empire is about the mobility and power of a global elite to shape the discourse of the major knowledge-producing institutions of our day and age.

That is to say: Although violence is still the most blunt and often effective tools in the imperial arsenal (see Iraq, 1991-2008), today’s empire shapers have a variety of more sophisticated techniques for quelling a more educated populace as well as dissipating the righteous rage of the downtrodden into a million different diversions.

The empire produces knowledge about the world, but it also produces ontology…that is it shapes what is to be known and makes it the truth. The various agents of empire have very sophisticated tools of media, mass marketing, and international finance mechanisms at their disposal and scholarship is not immune from the power of these tools. If you operate in say, Europe or America as a scholar, you do have certain freedoms—to write, to publish, to say what you like. But there are subtle ways in which the ontology of knowledge in the West is able to counter the antihegemonic strains within its plurality and maintain its core intact.

What I envision the scholar doing is using the tools of the empire—all the latest, most sophisticated conceptual frameworks for ‘studying’ the world and especially other cultures, and using these lens to look at the empire itself. Instead of using the masters tools to build our new house (an alternative to imperialism in all its forms), we are using those tools to burn down the masters house, or if it remains flame-retardant, then brick-by-brick, we will reveal all the shiny promises of instant gratification, value globalization, and ‘development’ to have its own dark-side.

There is a duality at the heart of this project, inevitably. Its a duality I am reminded of when I read that Farid Esack, the noted Islamic liberation scholar, was the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Professor at Harvard University (come to think of it, I think Prince al-Waleed sponsors more than a few things at Georgetown too). I do not think this duality can be avoided, especially if one wants access to the latest and most sophisticated resources and to keep abreast of the variety of theories produced within these institutions. I would rather someone produce the truth from a position within the empire than produce inferior scholarship outside of it. And this in itself may be a false dichotomy. But after watching enough videos and homemade DVDs from amateur 'professors' and 'teachers' claiming to be bringing knowledge to the people while spitting PURE unscientific NONSENSE, I've come to believe that right knowledge doesn't necessarily depend on being 'outside the system.'

Science is not somehow value free in the context of our discussion. For even as the industrialized countries produced some of the most stunning insights into our world through the scientific method, this method was tied to a culture whose core beliefs remained rooted in fratricidal warfare and extreme suspicion of the ‘other.’ It has proved to be a deadly combination, but I would caution against the mistake of blaming science or secularism for all these evils. The secular method of inquiry into the world has yielded the most fruitful and productive insights of any current tradition. Certainly religion must acknowledge the tremendous power of science and indeed, it has largely ceded certain domains to scientific explanation.
When we look at what the empire has done, a part of us must stand in awe of the power it has produced. At the same time, this façade of power is a mere smokescreen for catastrophic weaknesses inherent in its model. The signs are clear: the ‘progress’ of the last century or two in the West has come not only at the expense of the rest of the world, but of the planet itself.

Scholars in the humanities are perhaps more attuned to the political dimension of this problem, while scienctists and mathematicians may approach it more from the perspective of pure knowledge. But all would benefit by asking ourselves: who is the knowledge we produce benefiting? And what is the purpose of being a scholar? We cannot be content with the answer of ‘simply learning more’ but must go on to specify for whom and in what way. Thus one answer might read, “learning more about the Middle East in order to become an area specialist and consult with American foreign policy experts on how to represent American interests in the region.” An alternative answer might be, “To learn about different cultures and broaden my cultural understanding in order to become a bridge or ambassador between worlds.”
Or another answer might be, “To advance in academia far enough in order to gain the necessary freedom and prestige to return to my own country and do development work.” Or “To master the techniques of my chosen field in order to be able to engage in the current debates within that field and by doing so contribute to the progression of the field." To all these I would add my own personal goal: to gain knowledge in order that not only may overall human knowledge be advanced, but that knowledge will help serve in such a way as a historical witness against the violence of empire, against the fashionable babbling of our age, against the two extremes of hip, empty trendiness, and religious literalism stuck in the outmoded debates of a bygone age.

This project entails being down in the trenches, as it were, in the sense that the relevant information for scholars is not merely found among the halls of university campuses and scholarly quorums. For a while now the media has invoked the term 'public intellectual' or 'organic intellectual', so much they have made into a cliche (herein lies my only beef with Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson). For some of these PIs and OIs, the public side has outweighed the intellectual side and they have become too fond of panels and interviews. Nevertheless, the terms have a real and ongoing meaning for those like myself who seek to balance impeccable scholarship (which entails a large amount of time buried in archives and books) and an engaged political stance against the various dimensions of empire.