make sense of what he also terms the Salafi movement, and like Oliver he prefers this term rather than ‘Wahhabi,’ which he also calls a misnomer.55 Wiktorowicz claims we can distinguish between different groups within the wider Salafi tradition according to how they interpret Islamic religious texts. Pertinent is his example regarding the differences in reasoning on the use of weapons of mass destruction. Wiktorowicz writes that many jihadists today cite the Prophet Muhammad’s sanctioning the use of a catapult during war as providing religious justification for their own use of weapons of mass destruction:
In drawing analogies, jihadis argue that the catapult was the WMD of the Prophet’s lifetime and that his example legitimates the use of WMD today. This conclusion is not rooted in an objective reading of the religious sources: it is entirely dependent on whether one views the catapult as the historical equivalent of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Human reasoning thus plays a critical role.56 [emphasis added]
Wiktorowicz makes a very important point that very few scholars representing Wahhabism acknowledge, that “human reasoning . . . plays a critical role” when it comes to making sense of things in the social world like religious texts and different events. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt have both emphasized the crucial roles human reasoning and prejudice play in how we make sense of the world.57 The works of Gadamer and Arendt remind us that translating is a not an exact science with an objective outcome, but is instead a subjective and political act. It is clear that Oliver’s translation of Arabic religious texts into English is influenced by, among other things, a desire to defend his understanding of the Islamic faith.
This contest to make sense of Wahhabism occurring between the different scholars I have drawn on in this chapter is a microcosm of a much wider debate occurring between intellectuals relying on very different analytical and theoretical frameworks and influenced by different interests, commitments, and what scholars like Gadamer have called prejudices.58 My cursory review of some of the scholarly literature dedicated to making sense of Wahhabism helps highlight a number of important issues warranting and legitimating this research. My review helps show that a scholar’s interests and truth claims have major implications for how they make sense of and represent Wahhabism. I have shown how an intellectual’s desire to promote the interests of a particular group or intellectual tradition can result in very different representations of Wahhabism, ranging from Wahhabism as responsible for promoting and inspiring modern Islamic terrorism to Wahhabism as a religious belief system that promotes peace, harmony, and tolerance. In the next two chapters I want to take a closer look at some of the issues I have raised during this chapter, specifically the role and responsibilities of the intellectual, making sense of truth, and the crucial role prejudice plays in influencing how we make sense of the social world.
On Intellectuals, Prejudice, and Understanding the Social World
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
—Juvenal, Satires
Socrates often wandered through the marketplace in Athens asking people whether they had any knowledge to reveal to him. His practice of the Socratic dialogue and use of Socratic irony (elencthia) implied that few of his fellow-citizens knew what they were talking about.1 Soon after he had been condemned to death by his fellow Athenian citizens, he told them, in what has since become one of the best-known philosophical phrases in the Western philosophical tradition, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”2 Socrates’s point was the more you lead such a life, the more equipped you are to live a good life.
Everything we know about Socrates as one of the first public intellectuals in the Western intellectual tradition tells us that he set loose several permanent puzzles for philosophy. One of the enduring puzzles was how we are to both examine our life and establish the veridicity or truth of the knowledge we claim to possess. This problem continues to haunt the sociology of intellectuals and provides something of the big puzzle sitting behind this book. Yet in this respect a nonremediable problem attends any such exercise. It does so in terms that echo the ominous question, who guards the guardians? When we ask, how are we to make sense of the sense-makers? This is a central question in the evolution of the sociology of intellectuals.
In the twentieth century, Karl Mannheim did more than most to establish the modern contours of the sociology of intellectuals.3 Mannheim wrote between two world wars, when older and longstanding cultural values were being shaken profoundly and many of his fellow intellectuals were making dire predictions about the future of civilization. Mannheim understood his work in Socratic terms as a search for knowledge that would play a crucial role in helping construct an equal society with a tolerant citizenry. Mannheim argued that citizens developed their freedom through self-reflection and by understanding their cultural origins.4 This was not however meant to be an easy or effortless task undertaken by the individual. Mannheim pointed to the all-important role of the intellectual and to the intersection between the reflective practice of the intellectual and those decision-makers like politicians and policymakers who deal with day-to-day politics.
Mannheim began his seminal work Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by addressing the problem of how men think.5 He distinguished between everyday thinking and the kind that is done by philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in special circumstances. Mannheim designed a critical method he believed intellectuals could draw on to help create a better society. This method acknowledged both the specificities of historical context and the need to achieve a certain objectivity that would enable us to see the world as uncontaminated by ideology, which he understood as the kind of knowledge shaped by social interests or partisan politics.6
At the same time Mannheim saw the intellectual as charged with the responsibility of developing utopian ideals without retreating into a contemplative state completely removed from political life. However, Mannheim struggled to say how this would be possible. He argued that intellectuals necessarily enjoy a certain amount of freedom, because they are free-floating and the keepers of cultural standards, which allows them to operate freely from the constraints of ideology. Mannheim also offers important insights about dealing with competing value systems.
Developing a sociology of knowledge was Mannheim’s method for arbitrating this competition. He argues that intellectuals capable of operating outside particular value and belief systems or ideologies could use this method to discover how and why particular individuals and groups see the world as they do. Mannheim writes:
. . . [T]he sociology of knowledge regards the cognitive act in connection with the models to which it aspires in its existential as well as its meaningful quality, not as insights into ‘eternal’ truths arising from a purely theoretical, contemplative urge . . . but as an instrument for dealing with life-situations at the disposal of a certain kind of vital being under certain conditions of life.7
Mannheim’s prescriptions are not designed to be “blueprints: it is neither a list of abstract desiderata for the philosopher nor a detailed program for the administrator.”8 Indeed, his work might be best understood as suggestions put forward with the intent of promoting discussion about the major political concerns of the moment. Whatever the success or failure of Mannheim’s own program, his thinking about the intellectual helped inspired the subsequent development of the sociology of intellectuals. His work poses important questions that have continued to be asked throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and which are still relevant today. His work raises difficult questions about the relationship between political partisanship and truth telling, the responsibilities of the intellectual, the relevant ethical and political motivations of intellectual practice, and the standards
