In the issue dedicated to memory and nation-building we invited Clifford Geertz, one of the leading American theorists and a proponent of interpretive anthropology, to comment on questions pertaining to the problem of national identity, religious mobilization, and cultural ferment in the world of Islam. Such a dialogue appeared especially productive in the issue featuring a rich discussion of problems of Islam and modernity in the context of the former Russian Empire/USSR and offered a broader, if sometimes quite different, perspective on Islamic societies and their encounters with nationalism elsewhere.
Our decision to query Clifford Geertz’s opinion was based on our assumption that the problem of nationalism and memory becomes obviously acute in Islamic societies, where national identities began to emerge within the sphere of and in the process of interaction with the religious and supranational cultural milieu, while the West’s successful attempt “to dominate the terms of the debate” often obscured and problematized the emergence of Islamic historical writing, one of the major prerequisites of modern nationalism.
Moreover, Clifford Geertz’s intellectual trajectory clearly demonstrates that many assumptions about the strength and universality of nationalism – assumptions often shared by major theorists of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner or Benedict Anderson – have been doubted recently, as national identities either failed to emerge or proved to be weaker than previously thought in many Third World countries.^[1] Clifford Geertz, who was one of the leading theorists pointing to the universality of nationalism as a way out of traditionalism as Third World countries emerged from colonialism, now questions the strength and success of nationalist projects.^[2] Geertz’s intellectual trajectory reflects a search for methodological instruments that can transcend the nation-centered narrative of the social sciences and humanities and is therefore of special interest to the intellectual program of the journal Ab Imperio. Geertz’s ideas about the local level of research and about the centrality of local situations provide a fruitful alternative to the nation-centered approach or to grand theories of “the clash of civilizations”, while allowing us to problematize notions of the unity or homogeneity of Islam as a civilization.
The following interview with Professor Geertz was conducted at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, on June 10, 2004.

Serguei GLEBOV. How would you evaluate the fact that many theorists of nationalism, people like Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Elie Kedourie, even Hans Kohn himself, started out as scholars of the East, of the colonial world, and of Islamic societies. Can we say that Islam remains today like 500 years ago a kind of the ultimate Other for Western humanities and social sciences, and not just for the public opinion, which allows scholars to distance themselves from their own context and to create meta-narratives of nations and nationalism?

Clifford GEERTZ. Well, I don’t quite know what to say to that… It seems to me that if you study the Third World as, well, not Kohn, but Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner were concerned with, you just run into Islam, I mean, they’re out there, by and large, across the middle line of the world, which is where the Third World countries mostly are. So this is partly simply a mere accident of world history that people like Gellner, Anderson, and so on worked on Islamic societies. Neither were Anderson and Gellner particularly Islamicists (well, Gellner did do some work on Islamic societies). And Kedourie, of course, is a special case because of the background of the Ottoman Empire and his nostalgia for it. So I don’t think there is a general conclusion to be drawn from that list of names. Except the fact that Islam tends to be [everywhere], if you go out to the rest of the world, much beyond the West, you run into it very quickly, it’s very hard to avoid, compared to Japan, or something else. So I am not sure if that suggests anything about Islam as a permanent Other. What is important, it seems to me, as I think you see in the work of these other people, really, Islam is, along I suppose with Christianity, even if Christianity is different, Islam is at once a pan-, world Islam, it’s all over the place, all over that middle line of the world, and yet it’s adapted to local circumstances everywhere, so almost everybody who studied it, whether it’s Anderson in Indonesia and myself in Indonesia, or Ernest [Gellner] in Morocco, gets confronted with this, perhaps not a paradox, but this tension between a highly universal religion and at the same time a very local national religion. Moroccan Islam is Moroccan Islam, and Indonesian Islam is Indonesian Islam, I have said that repeatedly, but a lot of people still assume a unity in Islam… You know, Pakistan is Pakistan, and Central Asia is Central Asia, they really have a distinctive quality. That’s true to some degree for Christianity, but… it doesn’t work out the same way. I don’t want to get into details on that, but as far as Islam is concerned it has this “it’s not a paradox”, it’s this complexity of being at once radically universalistic, you know, the Five Pillars are the Five Pillars everywhere, it’s the same, and yet being highly local, whether it’s Northern Nigeria or any other place, it has that quality partly because it has no priesthood to give it any unity that, say, Catholicism would have. So at each place the scholar who gets engaged with such places finds himself or herself facing this issue. I myself have recently written a paper published in somebody’s festschrift on the Near East and the Far East, which is about how Islam became adapted to these regions. So in that sense the reason for so many scholars of the Third World being confronted with the issue of Islam, or, to be more precise, with the fact of Islam, has to do more with that. And the other thing is that Islam spread more recently than any other major religion and it has that quality – you can see what happened to it. It spread very quickly, it was founded in the 7th century in the backwaters of the Middle East and within a few decades it was in Morocco. And later on it spread rapidly – you can see it happen in real history, in a way which is a little harder for Christianity because it was founded much earlier and it didn’t spread in this way. So I think it would have more to do with all this than with any notion of the absolute Other. My own cast of thought is such as to resist any notion of Islam as highly unified – obviously, as a creed it is unified, Quran is Quran, and Shari‘a is Shari‘a, and the Five Pillars are always the Five Pillars, but it has as I say an almost internal challenge to understand how such a radically universalistic and in some ways even simplified religion can adapt itself to such a variety of contexts and come out to be so disparate, not in it’s own context, so when Ben Anderson went to Indonesia, or Ernest Gellner went to Morocco, or Elie Kedourie looked back at the Ottoman Empire, they were all confronted by quite different phenomena, even if they are all called, and technically correct, “Islam”.

SG. Can we speak today (and could we speak in the past) about Islam as some single and relatively homogeneous “text” (apart from the Sunni – Shiite confrontation)? What is the degree of regional variation and the limits of acceptable differentiation in Islam? Has there ever existed (and was it ever possible) a project of “Islamic globalization” which is now allegedly challenging Western globalization? Is there “Islam” that transgresses national boundaries and prevents national identity formation within the Iranian and Arabic (but not Turkic and Tatar!) world?

CG. The reason I touched on these issues answering the first question is that it has been my obsession as a scholar, insofar as I am, of Islam, that it is highly differentiated. And again, it somewhat has to do with the context in which I came to work on it in this country, and it is true of the United States. There is this global notion here of something called “Islam”, with the capital “I” – a civilization, some massive entity, some massive Other. And I, of course, set my face against it. Without trying to deny the unity of Islam, I just don’t see it empirically. When I wrote “Islam Observed”,^[3] which is mainly about that, the empirical observation of Islam, my concern was to tell Americans (and at that time that was necessary) that there is no holistic notion of Islam. By now you can see some understanding of that but it is still very difficult. In the same way the Italian Catholics and the Latin American Catholics and the American Catholics and the German Catholics are not exactly the same thing, I wanted to get people to see a world religion in those terms… Now, does that – Islam – inhibit nationalism? I don’t see how it would. There are places where – the Maghrib is one of them – the differences between Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, the cultural differences are small enough, so that the only thing that makes for the differences is the way in which the colonialists drew the lines. Indonesia is almost the opposite – there also the colonialists drew the lines, but there a great heterogeneity was enclosed, so that you have an enormous cultural differentiation. So, what inhibits nationalism is this degree of cultural differentiation. What inhibits it is less Islam than whether or not the national frontiers or national enclosure covers a culturally homogeneous area or divides one up. Indonesia includes a vast diversity, as does in some degree India or Nigeria; so it depends on where the lines go as to the relationship between Islam and nationalism. In some cases there is a coincidence between the borders of Islam and the borders of the national area. In an area like North Africa where you have states cut up, certainly from Libya to Morocco, there isn’t much cultural difference. There is some, but it’s harder to detect. Algerian nationalism came more out of the Civil War than it did out of Algerian culture, and Morocco didn’t have a real civil war and the nationalist impulse was much less strong there. That’s the main difference and I don’t think it has to do with any intrinsic quality of Islam to inhibit nationalism at all. Recently, there has been a little bit of that because of the growth of the notion of pan-Islam, it has come back again, but it’s still not very strong in my view. I feel that, given the choice between the religion and the country, most people still are mainly attached to the country and Muslims can fight each other very well… I don’t think that Islam is inhibitory as far as nationalism is concerned. I do think the question of why nationalism has failed to have that much drive, particularly in the Third World as time has passed, is an interesting one. But I doubt the answer lies in Islam.

SG. There is another part of that question concerning the possible historically present project of “Islamic globalization”. How would you comment on that?

CG. Well, if you make it a project, you want to ask whose project it is… Certainly, there has been an impulse to globalization, or an impulse to global spread in Islam, as we can see – I will say it again – in the fact that it spread so rapidly. I think this has more to do with the nature of the religion. I once remarked some place that it’s a religion prepared for export. It’s possible to take it on in pieces. You learn the prayers, you do few other things, and it doesn’t matter if you do some other things, and slowly it becomes more complete. You can see it in many places, over the centuries; they become slowly Islamicized. People come, and the first thing they do is learn the prayers, and the pillars, and that’s about it. In Indonesia, they don’t read Arabic, they don’t understand Quran, or at least not correctly, they don’t pay attention to details sometimes. So Islam, as I said, was designed for export. It didn’t have to make it a conversion experience as often was the case for Christianity. You didn’t have to do any of that, and you also didn’t need any bureaucracy to do it, because there is no priesthood. So, it is, and it was, a sort of religion which I think diffuses itself very easily, very readily; it’s built to do that. People often talk about the Arabic basis of it, and of course it is deeply rooted in the Arabic language. But it spreads beyond cultural borders, even beyond linguistic borders, very very easily; it always has. Whether there has ever been an Islamic project – there have been moments when there were some pan-Islamic movements, although pan-Arabist movements have been stronger actually, if we look back at these movements. Well, an Islamic project of globalization? I don’t think so in the sense that there is some sort of a structure. There is no church, and there is no center, and if one calls it a project, then whose project is it? But Islam certainly did and does spread very easily. And it has, I think, more to do with the fact that it has a kind of stripped down quality, that it does take on new areas gradually, that it doesn’t involve the transfer of bureaucracies or large funds of money and so on; whereas Christianity is the counter-case of a world religion movement, where you have schools, preachers, and you have the kind of church bureaucracy, especially but not only in Catholicism. In Islam you don’t need any of that. Certainly, you can have some of that; you can have people who are in schools, etc. But you don’t need it really. All you need to be a Muslim is the confession of faith. If you say that you are a Muslim, no one has the right to question you. That makes it very easy to become a Muslim, and that I think is the main reason for its globalization spread from the very beginning and it spread very quickly; and it still diffuses, as you can see it in Black Africa. It needs less of a social infrastructure to do that. Well, that would be my take on it. I don’t think that there has been a “project”, except that in particular moments Islamic movements spread very quickly – in the 7th century, for instance. Even today I don’t think you can call it a “project”. As you can see, I don’t want to get into terrorism, but it is a very invertebrate structure. People don’t even know what Al Qaeda is; because it is not even a hierarchy, it is not a Church, it is much more diffused. It is this characteristic of Islamic movements which makes them appear ”global”.

SG. Contemporary discussions about the “factor of Islam” appeal to some fundamental qualities of Islam, allegedly generated in the 7th century. Does that mean that Islamic societies have not yet overcome the syncretic nature of ancient religions and do not possess over “ideology”, “politics”, or “literature”? If we are to accept the thesis of a variety of modernities, then what are the specifics of Islamic modernity?

CG. You are probably referring to the relationship between Islam and politics. For Islam has always been involved in secular life no less than Christianity. On the other hand, involvement of Islam in politics, in modern politics, is quite recent. It’s certainly not longer than this century – well, the last one, I keep forgetting that the millennium has turned. And even in the 20th century it begins slowly and there is certain prejudice against it. Islam, as religion at least, historically tended to be politically uninvolved. Traditional Islamic scholars took a distance from the state, and there was a radical distinction between politics and religion, more so than there was in the West at that time. As far as literature is concerned, I don’t see that Islam was less involved with it than, say, Christianity ever was…

SG. That is to say, we can accept that in Islamic societies literature acquired the same status of a major instrument of social critique as, say, in nineteenth century European literature?

CG. No, I don’t suppose it ever had that kind of independent status… But let me stay with Islamic politics for a moment. Islamic involvement in political forms, in party organizations, in political life in general, is a very recent phenomenon. Even after independence it took a while. In the first phases of independence, Islamic nationalism lost out. It lost out in Morocco, it lost out in Indonesia, and so on, and the political involvement of Islam only begins in the twenties and the thirties of the last century. The notion that Islam has traditionally been syncretic about politics is just not true, I think. Obviously, one cannot generalize about it – we are talking about more than a thousand years and thousand different places; but I think we ought to resist that notion.
Considering literature, I think what you really had in mind is the growth of the novel, which is a special thing in the modern period, and indeed it has not much happened in Islam yet. That kind of counter-tradition hasn’t had much of existence there. Poetry, of course, always has – satiric poetry, all kinds of rhetorical devices always have. I think there is a fairly recent European notion of religion as a narrow thing, and it comes from the secularization thesis, that religion is now being reduced to the private sphere (of course, in the West). I think that was mostly the case when I started studying religion in the 1950s. A widely popular thesis was that religion was disappearing everywhere in the West, that it was shrinking to the private, narrow sphere. But that turned out to be premature even in the West. So the contrast is less sharp than it would seem. I suppose there is a sense in which Islam still has a kind of cultural pervasiveness, in the Middle East, at least, which is not true of, say, France or England. But those two developments are really very recent, and I don’t think that you can safely say that their secularization is permanent. In this country, for example, you can see that religion is still very much part of politics, and the same holds for many Catholic countries.
Now, how does Islam adapt to modernity? Ernest [Gellner] had this theory that Islam was somehow the primary modern religion, because it was stripped down. I was never entirely persuaded by that, but there is a sense in which it has some force because Islam tends to be able to fix itself into a wide variety of social organizations and structures. So if there is such a thing as local modernity – and people understand modernity differently in different places – Islam seems well cut out for that. So if you’re going to have a differentiated modernity, rather than a single notion of what modernity is, which is essentially a Western notion of progress, it might be that Islam adapts to it with a certain kind of effectiveness. We shall see. It depends on which kind of tendencies will predominate in Islam. And that of course is not to be determined.

SG. How can one evaluate the role of Islam in the context of the nation-state crisis, the search for different forms of a post-national polity, and adaptation of Islam to the demands of nationalism? How creative or “reactionary” is the activization of Islam? Can we speak of an indigenous Islamic nationalism or is the latter a foreign (Western) political and social practice emulated by Islamic societies? What are the chances of nationalism in the Islamic world?

CG. Well, one of the most striking things that I see is that the nationalist project as such has not been overwhelmingly successful. If you take Indonesia there has been a lot of attention to the nationalist thrust, especially strong under Sukarno. That has certainly faltered. This is not to say that there is no nationalism or nationalist feeling; but that nationalism now tends to appear as a reactive force; people feel threatened and they react. But nationalism as a creative and positive force seems to me to not be as prominent and important as earlier theorists of the Third World thought – nationalism has not been as driving a force. Islam, on the other hand, has been such a force, in part because of the failure of such phenomena as pan-Arabism – pan-Arabic nationalism – so it was Islam that became more prominent. But in general I think that earlier scholarship – including my own, certainly Ernest[ Gellner]’s and Ben Anderson’s, may have taken nationalism to be more central than it was – or than it turned out to be, and overlooked some other kinds of possibilities for integration, in fact, for state integration rather than national integration. I wrote it a while ago in a critique of the whole idea of the “nation.” I tried to argue in one of my public lectures that in places like Nigeria, Indonesia, and so on, it’s hard to find a national unit that can identify with the state – it’s just too various and too differentiated. So it may be that the idea of nation, nationalism, nationality is less central to the development of the Third World polities than we usually assume. It’s obviously of importance and under certain kinds of authority it becomes quite vital. However, in the earlier phases of things all of us had something of a slight overevaluation of the force of nationalism, which is a Western idea. I tend to agree with that. For Ernest [Gellner], it was a Western thing, and you can see the same tendency in what I call the oil-drop notion of Ben Anderson – that nationalism starts off in South America and then spreads across the world. I tend to think that’s a bit too simple. Nationalism had more various origins than that, and you can’t really say that it was an entirely Western business. But, however we want to interpret the rise of nationalism and the social origins and the nature of it, I don’t think it has turned out to be as axial in the development of the Third World as we once thought. Now, what has been axial is hard to say. It’s not necessarily Islam or religion in general. Exactly what kind of polity, what kind of political systems, what kind of states, places like Nigeria, India, Indonesia, and so on are going to become is quite unclear. Ethnicity, language, religion, and national feeling, territory – these have all played a role in the evolution of these places. But it’s not clear that there is a central image around which everything can focus. Recently I have become more interested in what kind of political systems places with no clear national identification will develop rather than in nationalism as such – they’re not France, they’re not Denmark, which have a clear identity. Of course, those identities have always developed over time – but this does not seem to be happening in many Third World states. It might be, but I don’t see it. I think from early on in Third World states there was a notion that there is a natural development toward national integration, toward nationality, toward Indonesian-ness or Moroccan-ness, or Algerian-ness, which wasn’t in fact there, or at least it didn’t have the force it was thought to have. In the days of Sukarno and Nehru, there was the sense that secular nationalism was going to be the central cultural and political frame for these countries. It hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it’s about to happen. Islam of course played a role in these developments. In Indonesia, there was an attempt to fasten a strong national identity on the country under Sukarno, which failed. There also have been attempts to apply Islamic unity which have also, so far, failed. The country is too differentiated, both religiously and ethnically. And in Morocco, which is culturally much more homogeneous, it has also failed. So, it hasn’t happened, hardly anywhere you see that. I don’t think that nationalism is currently on the wane; I am not sure it was ever so successful… Of course, during the colonial revolutions it was important, because they defined themselves against mother countries. But once that was done, the impetus of nationalism somewhat declined, and what it is that holds Indonesia together or Morocco together isn’t quite clear. But it’s not just generalized nationalism in terms that Ernest [Gellner] talked about at the time. That kind of modernized homogeneity is not occurring!

SG. Do you see any particular periods or geographical regions that can help one understand the dynamics of interaction between Islamic and non-Islamic societies? Can a history of cross-cultural interaction and co-existence of various confessions within a given polity provide models for an interpretation of Islam and its role in the world today?

CG. Well, I haven’t myself thought about it much. I am not a Europeanist, so… I think it has a lot to do with that notion of two great cultural blocs opposing each other and never changing – it’s crazy… One of the interesting things that has never been worked on, or at least not enough, is the problem of Arab Christianity – in Syria and elsewhere, and what happened to Arab Christianity, which has been in the past, and remains, albeit to a lesser extent, a very important force. And it was always very much involved in the Islamic world. It was not exterior to it – these Christians were there all the time. There is a famous book called The Strange Death of Liberal England, and I think someone should write a similar book on what has happened to Arab Christianity – why did it decline? Especially in the late 19th century, when it was in the leadership of the nationalist movement, because the Arab Christians tended to be pan-Arabists, and they are still around – these Arab Christians, witnessing to the need to distinguish between Islam and Arab nationalism. Christians were very important in the period of nationalism and we still don’t have a history of why it didn’t work out, and what happened, and what’s going on. It is in the context of Arab Christianity that one can stop thinking about the Middle East as one big Islamic carpet. There must be more research on that, on the intrinsic tension in the Middle East between Arabism and Islamism and on the role Arab Christians played in that tension and on how they tried to moderate between these two. What looks to me on the surface – but I haven’t studied these issues thoroughly – the progressive failure, what happened to the Christian “project” in the Middle East – is of extreme importance for our understanding of the dynamics of Islam and the Middle East. I am not a Europeanist, so it is hard for me to find other examples. Spain of course comes to mind and the entire notion of the boundary in the Mediterranean, which people tended to cross all the time. Moroccans are very close to the Iberians, so that they are almost the same. The Mediterranean was a world of its own and it was always interchanging.

SG. Our journal is focused on the imperial experiences in Russia and the former Soviet Union and our readers may well be interested in such questions as state intervention in order to contain/administer Islam. Can you comment on those cases you studied? How persistent and/or efficient have different states been in intervening with Islam?

CG. Well, in “my” regions the policy has always been the de-politicization of Islam. It wasn’t allowed to have a public role. Indeed, it always didn’t try to enter into public discussion. At some points there have been attempts to appoint these or that officials and so on, but by and large they did not try to organize Islam or to administer it systematically. Colonial regimes were trying to get knowledge of Islam, and they were particularly alert to milleniarist movements or anti-colonial movements. So by and large I think that the form that Islam took in Indonesia was not deeply affected by the colonial state – it might have had some impact, but… Of course, there was a tendency among the Indonesian bureaucracy under the colonial state to be not Islamic, to be more Javanistic… So it’s hardly possible to say that the colonial state attempted to modernize Islam.
Under the independent regime in Indonesia there was of course a growth of nationalism, a growth of separatism, there were calls for a separate Islamic state. But that was crushed. In the first phases of independence, when I was there, in the 1950s and 1960s, Islam was fairly well contained, as were Islamic political parties – the main party was banned by Sukarno, actually. Under Suharto political Islam was also well contained, too. I am not sure if I am answering the question, but my sense is that there was little attempt to administer Islam.

SG. Was there ever an attempt to bureaucratically supervise Islamic practices in the region you studied?

CG. Not much. I think there was some, but really very light. There is a Ministry of Religion in Indonesia and there is probably increasing intervention especially in law systems, but by and large, I don’t think that the state has intruded deeply into Islamic life. As I said, there is a Ministry of Religion in Indonesia, there are Islamic parties, but they tend to be cooperative with the State. There are of course big organizations, but there is really no intrusion of the state into religious life. Even in Morocco, where there is more such intervention, by and large, there hasn’t been that much presence of the state in Islamic life.

SG. It’s remarkable about Indonesia, where the regime tended to represent itself as a modernizing force and the rational regulation of religious practices is one of the tasks of a modernizing regime, don’t you think?

CG. That is true but they didn’t tackle it head on. Sukarno is the best example. He tried to diffuse it. He had this great syncretic ideology, which combined secular nationalism, communism, and religion. All these were integrated into one fuzzy ideological notion. Religion was seen just as a part of that great synthesis, which was supposed to transcend it. Of course, as I said, it never happened, but it did prevent religion from becoming central to the entire project. Sukarno never really tried himself to get involved inside Islamic affairs. Perhaps by the end of his time, there was more involvement of Islamic scholars; but by and large they didn’t know how to go about doing it (that is, regulating religion), and second, they had a much more fuzzy, generalized notion of the relationship between secular projects and religion. So, even if they were rationalizers at heart, they didn’t go directly after the religious organizations. All Islamic institutions, schools, madrasas remained pretty much independent and are still independent. There were all these schools and the regime wanted to modernize them. But it didn’t do much in that regard because the Muslims always resisted the idea. And even in Morocco, where there is much more state involvement in such matters, the bureaucrats left Islam pretty much alone – a policy largely shared by the king. By and large, the notion of going and trying to change Islamic organizations and Islamic life has never been central in these countries, as far as I can see, except for the Sukarno’s attempt to swallow it up in a diffused kind of Javanism.

SG. I assume we can take it to be yet another example of the diversity of Islam – in the Russian empire the “well-ordered police state” attempted to regulate even the architectural design of mosques…

CG. They never tried to do that in Indonesia, and the Dutch didn’t either. I’d even say, the powers were rather afraid of doing that. I of course don’t know about the Russian experience, but in Indonesia the regime never had the necessary control – certainly the Dutch never had it, and even Sukarno hardly had it. He never tried to intervene directly into Islamic life and he didn’t know how to do it. He didn’t really have the techniques to do it. They had the army – both Sukarno and Suharto had the army as their instrument – but you can’t do much with Islamic communities using the army… The Dutch were hardly interested in the organization of Islamic life at all…

SG. And the Dutch were probably more interested in converting people to Catholicism or other forms of Christianity?

CG. That’s right. Mosques, by the way, have never been the object of regulation. In Morocco you have this marvelous thing – nowadays, there are a lot of squatters – people come and settle in the towns, these are called “illegal settlements”, and when they do this, the first thing they build is the mosque. And the government cannot tear the settlement down because you cannot knock over a mosque with a bulldozer – the public outrage will be too great. And that establishes the illegal settlement. The government, of course, has no control over the structure. And even the system of church land, to use the Western equivalent, is pretty local in nature. There is a national head of it in the cabinet, but he has no control over what goes on locally.

SG. It would appear, then, that the lines of division in the Islamic world depend on the strength of the state…

CG. To some extent… It depends on what kind of state it is and what it is trying to do… Certainly, the Indonesian state has been very active, but… it probably tried more to run around Islam rather than to modernize it or seriously intervene with it.

SG. For many observers the activization of the “Islamic factor” in world politics was an unexpected blast from the past, reviving memories of the medieval and early modern confrontations (rhetoric of the Crusade in the mass media and among the world leaders, discussions of fundamental differences between “Western” and “Islamic” worlds among journalists and social scientists, etc). “Memory” of the conflict in the 9th to 12th centuries is becoming a factor of contemporary politics and public opinion; a conflict ridden form of memory is becoming a model for thinking about and ordering reality. At the same time, one substitutes the “Western world” as an opponent of Islam for “Christianity” and represses memories of other models of interaction with Islamic civilization. Can we “remember” differently today, creating the basis for a dialogue with Islam? On the other hand, can we build a more nuanced model of today’s Islamic movement (without reducing it to the strawman of “fundamentalism” and grounding it in such elements of the modern scholarly discourse as “ideology”, “identity”, etc) on the basis of the selective self-genealogy of these very movements?

CG. I am not sure what to do with the complexity of the question… I would say that the first thing to notice is that much of what the Islamic world remembers comes from texts written in the West. This is a paradox that is hard to tackle… Because of the high rate of illiteracy, the lack of much publication, the lack of much translation, the history of Islam, the memory of Islam has largely been written by Western writers and by Muslims in the West. Even today, Bernard Lewis is probably more influential than any Muslim historians, even among those Muslims who hate this country, in shaping the notion of what their past was like. There is internal Islamic tradition that some intellectuals have access to; but by and large, the conception that exists of the past and of memory is largely a Western product, not an Islamic one. There isn’t even a great deal of effort to produce an objective history of Islam, there is no great concern with that. The number of really important histories written by Muslims before the last ten or fifteen years… well, before the last twenty-five years… you can count them using the fingers of your right hand… There is no Gibbon, there is no Ranke, there is none of that.. There is Ibn-Khaldun, genuinely one of the greatest historians of humanity, but he stands out as a great exception. And again, how many people read him in the Islamic world? Perhaps Ernest Gellner is more known than Ibn-Khaldun. So the memory that you talk about is again a modern product, a Western product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And concerning the model of Islam and of its memory, whether it could be changed – I think yes, if Muslims, Afghanis, Indonesians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, begin to write real history, if they try to understand what really did happen, and if in doing so they draw on sources beyond those (and they will be able to do so, undoubtedly) we already know. If that begins to happen and they begin to question some of the Western doctrines, I think that the history of Islam will be remembered quite differently and the past will be much more accessible to Muslims. Of course, there remains the problem of language – the gap between the local languages and the scholarly language in general. But you can probably see signs of such a scholarly turn in the past 25 years or so; you are beginning to get people doing history that you’d recognize as being part of your field. If that happens, I think that both our notion and their notion of Islam’s past will change dramatically. For now, it’s largely defined by the West, and unless there emerge authors of Ibn-Khaldun’s stature (though not necessarily his style), coming from Islamic communities, until there is a definition of the Islamic past in the way and in the kind of a historical tradition that the West has, things will remain the same. I cannot claim that things are not changing, but it hasn’t happened yet.

SG. But do you think there is a possibility of a dialog – a scholarly dialog – with the Islamic world based on our understanding of the Islamic past?

CG. Yes, of course. I really never have had much trouble talking to Muslims. In that case, of course, the problem will be that we don’t know much except the standard stuff. But, yes, they would be open – they are even open to critique, and there is more and more self-reflection. But it’s a way to go before there is a matched competence, where things can be discussed… I don’t see any particular difference between talking to a Muslim and talking to any other person of a different culture… You can have dialogs. I used to live in Morocco, and I had talks about Islam all the time. I was very open, I’d say things that I am saying now, and they wouldn’t get furious, well, certain kinds of people would, but most did not… So I don’t think there is anything so radically “Other” about Muslims, that you can’t talk to them. The problem is that you have to find something to talk about, something that’s not heavily loaded on side because of the differential in historical traditions… But I am certain you can talk and that’s what I was trying to do – to get it open and to get going… I’d say something and they’d answer and I must say that I feel that I have been rather well received… That doesn’t mean they’d agree to everything I said, but they were rather open to things. My works appeared in Indonesia, were discussed in Morocco, discussed in Indonesia, and no one says he is a damn kafir, don’t talk to him… Well, a few people do; but they are the kind that wouldn’t talk to anyone anyhow. Most people will say, this part is right, that part is wrong, this is what I think about the matter. I don’t find dialog with Muslims any harder then the dialog with my compatriots…

SG. Do you think that the terms of this dialog can be elements of modern Western scholarly discourse – ideology, identity, for example – or do you think that this language is not applicable?

CG. I think that if this dialog goes on, the terms of it will develop with it, you don’t just say these are the terms we are going to discuss, this is what we do, etc. But you have got to start somewhere. If we take ideology or identity as a subject, for example, there are various concepts in Islamic tradition that you can explore. None of us really has multiple backgrounds, and if you go – if I go as I did – to Morocco or Indonesia or elsewhere, I say this is what I’ve got, this is my own background, this is my own notion of what history is, and you listen to people who have all that of their own. And you learn how to build a dialog. There is a dialog and a dialog, a discourse and a discourse, I mean, there are Western social scientists who will come up with a list of questions and start asking people what is your identity. But I don’t work that way. I start a discussion, and I say, well, I don’t understand what the hell is all that stuff about radical Islam. That is to say, you begin a discussion rather than try to set a frame within which the discussion has to take place. You have to start in some place, but you have to open the way in which the discussion can take form. So there are really two ways of approaching it – I am thinking about social sciences: you can go in with a schedule of questions, schedule of ideas, schedule of notions, and ask people to check them off. I think that’s pretty ineffective. I think it’s much more effective and the way in which I tried to work, is to go in with a certain attitude to certain kind of things, and you try to find out what their attitude is. And in some cases some of your views will change, and at least some of their views will change, and you will probably end up speaking more effectively to one another. This is more effective than trying to schedule the dialog or plan it all out. So I think dialog is possible. I know that it’s possible, I have done it. But it seems to me that the West sometimes tends to cut it off by trying to dominate the terms of the trade before it starts…

SG. How should one study “Islamic societies” from the point of view of contemporary cultural models of society? What is Islam as a “cultural system” from the point of view of interpretative anthropology? Can one speak about Islam as a cultural system in universalist categories? On the other hand, what is the scale of studying Islam as a local cultural system? How can these two research scales be reconciled?

CG. Well, I am trying to think about what I did and do… It’s just that it’s such a large question, really… What I did, in fact, in both cases, in Morocco and in Indonesia, was to go into a local situation, all by myself, talk to people, trying to understand what Islam meant – as far as we are talking about it – what role did it play, and how did it integrate into a local society, and then, in order to get a general notion of things, build up a comparative frame – I used Morocco and Indonesia mostly but you can open it up to Islamic societies generally. So rather than starting from the top – a top down sort of thing – when you say this is what Islam is, something that Ernest [Gellner] did, he tended to say what Islam was, and then to see how it played out in different places, I tended to do it the other way. I tended to find out what’s going on locally, in different places, and then try to construct some sort of a bridge, a comparative frame, in which all of these make some sort of sense… Now, both of these are valuable ways of looking at things but I certainly am committed to the way I do it. So I try always as much as possible to describe things in vernacular terms, in terms in which things are articulated locally, and then try to see what these various articulations mean, how you can translate between them back and forth, whether they’re different, whether they’re similar, whether they’re constant, etc. I am not sure to what extent I am answering your question here but I really think it’s a question of starting from the top, with a general notion of what Islam is, or, alternatively, trying to get to the situation from below, locally.

SG. Do you think that if we approach Islam as an ideology, there is a collision of a traditional society and its culture and modern ideological creativity? How does such a collision reveal itself?

CG. What I think has happened is that there is an enormous mobility of Muslims these days. As this is occurring, you know, 20 million Indians living outside of India, Muslims in France, everywhere, really… I think that the simple relationship between the local situation and religious beliefs is much more tenuous now than it has ever been. And it’s also true of people who didn’t leave their countries but moved locally in geographical or social terms. So this – it’s not exactly simple – but the rather direct relationship between everyday life and religious beliefs has been attenuated. Muslims in France, or Moroccans in France, are quite different from those living in Morocco. Islam becomes much more self-conscious, there is much more to think about if you are in a foreign situation, if you exist in a non-Muslim world, and so there has been a natural interaction between local situation and religious self-conception. I have already seen that happening in Indonesia and Morocco locally in the 1960s, and by now, with that great shift of populations, and intrusions in both directions. It’s a very complex process, this mobility, this process of self-reflection gaining in strength. You get a changed sense of self-definition. Of course, nobody in Morocco has to spend any time thinking about how to define themselves as a Muslim. They are Muslims, everybody knows that. How good are they as Muslims may be a problem, but you don’t have to wear a headscarf to show that you’re a Muslim, it’s just the natural thing to do. This great mobility, self-reflection, new context, sets faith, sets Islam, sets one’s personal sense of who one is in a quite different context, and that makes what I call “religious-mindedness” as opposed to simple believing much more in the foreground… You have got to think much more about what it means to be a Muslim if you live in Bradford and they don’t let you to kill sheep on your holy days. Suddenly, there is a new dimension to your experience. In Morocco or Indonesia, that is not an issue, at least it doesn’t arise that way. In traditional societies – I don’t like the term but I am going to use it anyway – the relationship between everyday life, secular life, cooking, eating, whatever it is, and religion are much more direct and unselfconscious. You know, if someone dies, that’s what you do: you bury him or her according to Koran, the Shari‘a, etc., whereas if you are suddenly in France, you have different problems, and they are the kind of problems that simply do not arise in traditional societies. So that makes religion, if you want, more of an ideology. I don’t like that term for that situation, though… So these encounters really make religion more self-conscious, and they make it kind of a “portable identity” – you know, if you’re living in France, being from Indonesia, Morocco, and so on, being a Muslim is a much more negotiable identity. So there is a sense in which Islam becomes a broader negotiable identity, it becomes something that you are, that you can say you are to an environment which is not that. So things have become much more self-conscious, much more a matter of self-presentation, so questions like wearing a headscarf have become crucial, and they wouldn’t make any sense in a place like Morocco…

SG. To round up our discussion, may I ask you if you know of the reception of your work in Russia? In particular, are you aware of the parallels drawn between your work and the “school of semiotics” in Tartu, led by Yuri Lotman?

CG. No, I really know very little about how my work is received there. I don’t read Russian and I don’t study the region… I read one article on my work, in translation, which was quite good and generally favorable… I also know very little about the Tartu school – aside from these available English summaries that I read. I can see why parallels can be drawn, but of course there was never any real connection. In terms of Russian influences I can probably name Roman Jakobson…

SG. Perhaps, Jakobson is a good example of someone whose intellectual genealogy is little known in the US, especially his very diverse and provocative thought during the 1920s and 1930s…

CG. You’re right, I knew Roman, he arrived at Harvard as a breath of fresh air in what was then a heavily behaviorist milieu, and he came as if out of nowhere…

SG. Let me thank you for this opportunity to discuss your views and ideas. Our readers will certainly appreciate your insights into the problem of the complex interrelationships between religion, nationalism, and modernity. One of the central issue of our quest as an intellectual project is to explore the limits of the category of nation as an analytical model and I am sure that our readers will be very interested in your approaches.