Summary
Abdullah Laroui, the Moroccan historian and political theorist who, in Said’s account in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV, is the only scholar to have undertaken a serious critique of Gustave von Grunebaum’s views, using the motif of reductive repetition in von Grunebaum’s work as a practical tool of critical anti-Orientalist study (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.306-307 / printed p.297-298).
Details
- As Laroui says, in Said’s quotation: the adjectives von Grunebaum affixes to the word Islam (medieval, classical, modern) are neutral or even superfluous, and there is therefore for von Grunebaum “only one Islam that changes within itself” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.307 / printed p.298).
- Laroui’s analysis shows how von Grunebaum employed A. L. Kroeber’s culturalist theory to understand Islam, and how this tool necessarily entailed a series of reductions and eliminations by which Islam could be represented as a closed system of exclusions, each diverse aspect of Islamic culture a direct reflection of an unvarying matrix (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.307 / printed p.298).
- Laroui rightly maintains, in Said’s account, that history as a complex order of events, temporalities and meanings cannot be reduced to such a notion of culture, in the same way that culture cannot be reduced to ideology, nor ideology to theology (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.307 / printed p.298).