like the one offered by Ari Adut that provide a better and more useful way of understanding this concept.61
Adut’s conceptualization of the public sphere fits perfectly with how we can understand representations as working. The idea of access is integral to Adut’s conceptualization, and he describes three ways people are able to attain this. One is to be physically present in the space, for example, when people meet and talk in the street. The second has to do with representational access, meaning that one’s name, image, or words can appear in spaces like newspapers or magazines. Thirdly, we can have sensory access when the contents of the space are made available to our senses.
The term public sphere implies general access; however, the reality is quite different. Many public spaces have obstacles preventing most of us from being seen or having our opinions heard. This is especially the case when dealing with spaces that tend to receive a lot of publicity. Generally speaking, the more publicity a space receives, the harder it is to be heard or seen. Mainstream US newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are good examples, as a select few contributors are able to publicize their opinions. When dealing with spaces that receive relatively high amounts of publicity, physical access becomes very hard and representational access is highly valued. Nearly anyone can submit an opinion piece to these newspapers, but very few will ever have their articles printed.
Conversely, forums on websites that encourage inclusivity like 4chan provide examples of spaces that receive relatively less publicity but are easier for people to access. Despite this, few would deny that newspapers like the New York Times form an important part of what we conceptualize as the public sphere. As a space it does not grant general access but it does provide many with sensory access. The public sphere as conceptualized by Adut is thus a generic term denoting all virtual or real spaces, the contents of which obtain general visibility or audibility. Key here is the term ‘virtual,’ which points to the important role played by online platforms. The internet as the new public sphere or as a key part of the public sphere continues to be a focus of much scholarly enquiry as more users go online to get information.62 The integral role played by social media in the recent Arab Spring shows just how important the online world has become.
At this point it is also necessary to clarify whom we categorize as an intellectual and explain the basis for these claims. There has been and continues to be a lot of discussion about who is and who is not an intellectual. As we see with authors like Gramsci, Mannheim, Foucault, and Said, the conceptualizing of who or what is an intellectual is often tied to the role and responsibilities these authors believe intellectuals should adopt and adhere to. We are wise to reject the narrow and arguably prescriptive conception of the intellectual offered by authors like Said and Foucault, where the intellectual is someone existing on the margins of society.63 More apt is the inclusive approach like that promoted by Gramsci. In this book, an intellectual is understood to be anyone who uses ideological apparatuses like the print and mass media and digital technologies to produce and disseminate representations of Wahhabism.
Whereas those adopting a more narrow definition of the intellectual may distinguish between a commentator, understood as someone who expresses a written opinion on a subject in the public sphere, and an intellectual, a relatively more inclusive approach means a commentator is treated as an intellectual. While Gramsci’s ideas are hugely influential, it should be noted that the conceptualization of the intellectual used in this book is not Marxist, in that there is no reliance on any determinist assumptions about the work of the intellectual in relation to their class origins or affiliation. We can however associate our understanding of an intellectual to a particular group, including those writers promoting liberal and neoconservative values and beliefs.
I am also interested in the broader question about the role intellectuals play in creating what Anderson calls Imagined communities and what Said calls Imagined geographies.64 These scholars, in addition to those like Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Smith, Ronald Suny, and Michael Kennedy, are among those to recognize the important roles intellectuals play as catalysts in a variety of nationalist ideologies and movements.65 Animating and legitimating this book is the desire to understand and make sense of the role intellectuals representing Wahhabism play in socially constructing a community that is imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group, and the way intellectuals use text to create a perception of space that has helped inspire the global war on terror. It is in this sense that intellectuals play crucial roles in shaping the politics of modern societies.
The nature of the political is a second wider intellectual problem at stake. How we are to understand politics, including how we define it and what we think the aims and goals of politics are, has been the focus of much scholarly debate. Early twentieth-century authors like Carl Schmitt and Max Weber offered challenging accounts of the political, controverting the then-conventional liberal framework. Weber and especially Schmitt questioned why this tradition had too readily assumed the legal, rational, and ethical norms undergirding the legitimacy of liberal democracies, a position that had long been accorded a hegemonic conceptual status in the West.66 In more recent times authors like Bernard Crick and Simon Critchley have contributed to a different kind of critique of the liberal tradition.67 For Crick and Critchley, politics is about helping to end injustice and wrongs suffered by the Other.68 Like these scholars, it is important to understand that intellectuals representing Wahhabism make different assumptions that influence their representations. This matters when we begin to consider the influential role these representations can play in the policymaking process.
The relation between intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism and the policy- and decision-making process is the third key intellectual problem animating and legitimating this book. Bacchi provides an important and revisionist account of policy as a product of processes that lead to a particular way of representing political or policy problems. Her work is important because it helps show how policy works, how we are governed, and how the practice of policymaking implicitly constitutes us as subjects. Bacchi highlights the integral role intellectuals play in this process as it is them who are framing, choosing to highlight or ignore, particular aspects of problems in their representations that are informing the policy-making process.69
This raises some very important questions when we think that these intellectuals’ representations of Wahhabism have the ability to influence foreign policy in an age where Western liberal governments are obsessed with the (real or imagined) threat posed by radical Islam. This circumstance requires that we ask, what are the bases for these representations? What are intellectuals choosing to emphasize and ignore, and why? What particular claims to truth are intellectuals relying on to support their assessments of the situation?
This takes me to my fourth and final problematic animating and legitimating this book, which is making sense of and dealing with the relation between truth and politics. This issue has been raised by a number of writers, including Hannah Arendt. Arendt writes that we live in an age of mass manipulation where even the status of factual truth is likely to be challenged.70 We have, as Stephen Toulmin and John Caputo more recently pointed out, moved beyond a conception of truth framed in terms of timeless and universal propositions, without needing to give up on the idea of truth itself.71 This entails that we still find ways of dealing with different claims to truth, particularly those that are religious and political in origin or substance.
Unable to make certain assumptions about truth that would then require defending a particular view and testing the veridicity of particular representations of Wahhabism against this view, I instead deal with the role prejudice plays in truth claims. I follow Arendt’s advice and deal with the relation between truth and politics by identifying and unpacking the prejudices attached to and inspiring these truth claims.72 This speaks to the much larger problem of how we should treat truth claims in the political sphere, which has major implications for things
