Western Imaginings

The book under review is a serious effort to understand western representations of the phenomenon called ‘Wahabism’ from the perspectives of various neo-conservative and liberal intellectuals. The author Rohan Davis (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia) has a keen interest in neo-conservative and liberal intellectual traditions, the impact of which is found in the methodology of this book. However, the focus of this work is on representations of Wahabism and not what is defined as Wahabism per se. The book consists of six chapters. The first three chapters emphasize the methodology and premises for understanding the phenomenon of Wahabism while the next three chapters deconstruct the liberal and neo-conservative imaginings of Wahabism. The contestation of defining the term begins with various scholarly interpretations or representations of Wahabism. In chapter one, the author endeavours to take us to the imagined communities and geographies created by western perspectives on the East, the numerous imagined representations which once framed the discourse of Orientalism in the West. In these imagined spaces the depiction of Wahabism as backward, anti-modern and irrational is found in the works of the likes of Benedict Anderson, Dore Gold, Bernard Lewis and David Commins.