The thesis of this book is that Muslim intellectual life did not die a natural death in the mid-19th century — it was murdered.
Hallaq proposes that the tarantula’s bite of modernity entails “structural genocide” of that which is pre-modern, which included the dismembering and eventual destruction of traditional Islamic institutions, extending to actual human genocide at the place of contact, notably even today in Israel. The Orientalist gaze, he says, does not extend to every sort of statement made about the Orient by a Westerner, but is more specifically the product of a mindset that cannot tolerate the Orient and ultimately desires to destroy it. "Before the modern European subject was formed as a deployable colonist," Hallaq writes, "he was already colonized as an epistemological subject who could think the world as a generic Orientalist."
He has a few recommendations to undo the corrosions of such a mindset:
1. We should seek out the truthful core of Edward Said's book Orientalism, which has made it an academic staple despite its historical errors.
2. As a replacement for Said’s shortcomings, we should look to the metaphysical worldview of René Guénon, including his concept of East and West. Hallaq proposes that Guénon has a sharper view than Said of what Orientalism is and what it does, and how to counter-act it at the intellectual level.
3. We should take the works of Carl Schmitt as symptomatic of the state of modernity, viewing them as useful but suspicious. In particular we should question his concept of the "state of exception", instead proposing a "state of extraordinarity" which constitutes "the moment of truth in the ordinary" and brings out the unsustainable, inhumane truth of everyday life in globalist modernity. Both Nazism and Zionism serve as extraordinary expressions of the ordinary modern paradigm.
Linking his thesis into the massive, global problems of environmental crisis and alienation, Hallaq contends that we will be unable to counteract the inherent unsustainability and sociopathic nature of modernity until we are able to find an epistemologically anti-modern alternative center.
Basically this book is an academic endorsement of Guénonianism. That’s five stars from me. But I have to take off a star because Hallaq’s rhetoric, however fierce his opinions may be about modernity, is couched in the relativism and methodological obsessions of academic language. This is certainly a book to cite if you are writing a doctoral thesis, but I would say that his critique of academia does not go nearly far enough.