6 Citizenship after orientalism
Genealogical investigations
Introduction
The title of this chapter draws from the research I have been undertaking for nearly a decade now. It was sparked by Being Political which raised some issues about the orientalist origins of citizenship and how it depended on a distinction made between the occident and the orient.1 While raising these issues Being Political did not address them since its main focus was to provide genealogies of (‘occidental’) citizenship to produce a different image of citizenship against its others, what I called its strangers, outsiders and aliens.2 This was a pluralist and relational (or dialogical) history of citizenship read against the others on which it depended to exist. Almost simultaneously, I also published an essay on the orientalist origins of citizenship entitled ‘Citizenship after orientalism’.3 Little did I know then that with that title I was embarking on a decade-long research programme at the end of which I would still remain only at the surface of the question I articulated (or rather stumbled upon).
The centre of my attention became Max Weber who, more consistently and explicitly than any scholar, not only thought that citizenship was a unique occidental institution but that it also provided the foundations of modernity and capitalism. For Weber citizenship as political subjectivity enabled the performance of a ‘pure and simple’ identity that was above and beyond any other affiliation or belonging.4 For Weber then citizenship as ‘political subjectivity’ means to conduct oneself as a rights-bearing subject with no obligations other than those that are connected to those rights that one bears. Was Weber right in thinking that citizenship was a uniquely occidental (as he termed it) ‘political subjectivity’? This question appears at first rather a benign, if not banal, question. (I hope it will not remain that way for too long in this chapter.) But the more I dwelt on the question and tried to understand what Weber may have meant by this distinction and what importance he may have attached to it in the context of his broader comparative historical sociology, the more I became concerned (perhaps obsessed) with a latent assumption of his thought: orientalism in the sense of assuming that there was indeed a fundamental distinction between occidental (European) and oriental (Chinese, Indian and Islamic) political subjectivities and identities. Moreover, this distinction was not only fundamental but also explained why capitalism would develop in the occident and not in the orient.
While considering it a troubling aspect of Weber’s thought, many scholars still refuse to be drawn into discussing ‘Weber’s orientalism’. While there is a very strong argument in Weber’s work that citizenship constitutes the foundations of capitalism and explains its origins in the occident, with some exceptions on his interpretation of Islam,5 this remains largely a mute issue.6 Significantly, Said makes only a brief mention of Weber. (Though that should not be surprising given Said’s background in humanities rather than political theory or social science.)7
Yet, while Weber’s orientalism and the interpretations of citizenship as the foundation of (occidental) capitalism may still appear as a rather obscure scholastic question, we have witnessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries new colonial wars and occupations (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). They depended on – and were possibly justified by – the assumption that oriental cultures ‘lacked’ citizenship (and its ostensible accompaniment democracy).8 Still more broadly we have been made aware of internal colonizations of indigenous and African peoples who suffered and endured what might be called ‘internal colonialisms’.9 Moreover, the development of international human rights law and its deployment as cloaked citizenship law is amongst the most contentious issue of politics in the world today.10 Thus, returning to Weber’s orientalism in interpreting citizenship and more broadly tracing the origins of the orientalist interpretation of citizenship is anything but a benign or banal question. It enables us to ask rather fundamental questions about some key concepts of (occidental) political thought albeit with a focus on citizenship. I have discussed some of these issues elsewhere.11 Yet the aim has never been a ‘critique’ of Weber. Rather, the question is how do we go about investigating citizenship (as political subjectivity) without (or after) orientalism?
The focus of this chapter is the methodological dimensions of this question rather than empirical or substantive matters. I am drawn to Michael Freeden’s challenge to political theorists to think through cross-cultural comparisons. I suggest that, while not the only plausible way, Nietzsche–Weber–Foucault inspired genealogical investigations are capable of cultivating ‘styles of thought’ that Freeden invites political theorists to investigate, what he calls ‘actually existing political thought’. An outline of the relevant aspects of Freeden’s challenge follows. A discussion of how genealogical investigations respond to this challenge with examples drawn from research on Ottoman civic gift-giving practices illustrates the main argument. A proposal to expand these investigations to Chinese, Indian, Islamic and indigenous conceptions of political subjectivity concludes the chapter.
Cross-cultural theory about actually existing political acts
Michael Freeden issued a strong challenge to political theorists to think in cross-cultural ways.12 While Freeden does not explicitly argue this, the underlying assumption in this challenge is the acknowledgement of the western bias in political theory – a bias that has led to many cul-de-sacs. For Freeden cross-cultural political theory should be:
driven by the belief that the balance of research and insight of political theory must at least in part detach itself from the almost exclusive focus on Western Europe and North America if we are to accumulate knowledge on what it means to think politically across cultures and continents and if we are to appreciate the richness and diversity of such thinking.
Yet, Freeden argues, such comparisons cannot simply replicate ‘west’ versus ‘east’ comparisons. Going beyond such gross comparisons:
will require identifying and assessing various units of comparison – discourses, concepts, epistemologies, themes, etc. Most so-called comparative studies in political thought have to date suffered from being side-by-side expositions without a genuine endeavour to engage in critical micro-comparison.
For Freeden one reason for this is that ‘Many political philosophers are too focused on asserting the universality, or nigh-universality, of reason, discourse, concepts or values to pay much attention to temporal and spatial variations’.13 To put it simply,
Many historians of political thought are ill-equipped to make detailed comparisons between more than one tradition of political thought and, when they are so equipped, may talk in general terms about mentalities, climates of opinion and varying national experiences as a backdrop to the detected differences in political thinking, rather than compare texts and utterances directly.14
By contrast,
The aim of comparative investigations of political thinking would by no means replace the other approaches to, and methods of, studying political thought, but it could lead to an additional body of theory about political thinking that may shed light on its more unobserved and underplayed features; and it could equip us with cross-cultural and intra-cultural tools to be applied regularly, if no doubt loosely, to various instances of political thought.15
Freeden’s matter-of-fact style is deceptive. His challenge is formidable. Freeden is not only challenging political theorists to think across cultures but to do so with genuinely reformulated comparisons. For this he also issues a programme. Freeden insists on studying actually existing political thought that focuses on:
… the political thinking actually taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in their political capacity as decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conflict regulators, support mobilizers, and vision creators; and the thinking consumed by them in that capacity. Politics may have been termed the art of the possible, but it is a ‘possible’ based on the ‘feasible’ and its study has always focused on the here and now, whether in complacent or critical mode.16
For Freeden the study of actual political thinking or thought involves two dimensions.17 First, it involves investigating political thinking in actually existing practices, situations and institutions. The focus here is to investigate how thought is deployed in concrete instances geared toward achieving specific objectives (and exercising power) whether these are consciously articulated or articulable or not. Second, it also involves studying thinking about politics embedded in ideational configurations. The focus is here the thought that is geared toward achieving policies, programmes, visions, arrangements, rules and entities that function as contested and contestable ideational or ideological configurations. Two dimensions of studying actually existing forms of thought are interrelated and complement each other for a critical and reflective political theory. While all subjects engage in political thinking, thinking about politics is open to only those subjects whose authority (status and position) allow them to engage in production of language broadly defined as all aural, visual or textual statements. These are ideological configurations not in the sense of distorted representations of realities but in the sense of being constitutive elements of making realities.
Freeden’s challenge for what we might call a ‘cross-cultural theory about actually existing political acts’ is both welcome and timely. For nearly a decade now I have been attempting such a political theory by studying ‘citizenship’ in Ottoman political practices with as yet no discernible breakthroughs. Yet, like Freeden, I am determined that we must overcome orientalism in political thought (for many more reasons than I can explore here). That is why revisiting Weber is so crucially important as he was also driven by the belief that we must think across cultures and comparatively. So if I am convinced that Weber could not go beyond orientalism we have to start with him to think about citizenship after orientalism.
‘Citizenship’ is associated with political subjectivity in a paradoxical way. While at its face value we might think that political subjectivity would be meaningless without citizenship, we also know that political subjectivity is enacted without citizenship (i.e. by those who do not hold the status). If citizenship is a bundle of rights, political rights, amongst which perhaps the most important is the right to political subjectivity (the right to conduct oneself as political, as a claims-making, rights-bearing subject), are an essential component of that bundle. Is political subjectivity merely a synonym for voting and, perhaps more broadly, franchise? This paradox arises from at least two meanings associated with political subjectivity. The first is, of course, voting (or franchise). As Marshall demonstrated, political rights are associated with the nineteenth century and the expansion of the franchise to working classes and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, voting (and franchise) are expressions of a broader right, the right to have rights, and this is the second meaning, which means to partake in decisions (or at least have a say in them) that affect our lives and the lives of others.18 Taken together, these meanings (formal and substantive) of political subjectivity make it the kernel of citizenship in the sense that citizenship can be exercised by those who do – as well as who don’t – hold legal status. The ways in which Weber conducted his comparison and reached his conclusions with his studies of India, China, Judaism and Islam are beyond the focus of this chapter, as I discussed these elsewhere.19 How do we investigate citizenship as actually existing political acts with genuine comparisons across different cultures?
Genealogical investigations about actually existing political acts
The first aspect of these investigations is a genealogical approach to historical sociology and politics. Genealogy in historical sociology and politics is both a perspective and a method that emerged with Nietzsche and was developed most prominently by Foucault in a series of original studies on asylums, prisons and hospitals.20 Simply put, genealogical investigations address the question ‘how did we get here?’ in a given social, political, cultural or economic ‘thing’.21 Yet, that question is more complex than it appears. Genealogical investigations are neither about a search for origins nor about giving accounts of a development or progress. Rather, these investigations enable us to trace how many ideas, practices, techniques, and tactics emerge in different contexts to address different problems and which can be assembled to address yet another set of problems. Raymond Geuss usefully contrasted Nietzschean genealogy with ‘tracing a pedigree’, which involves finding a single line of descent in any given thing, creates a continuous and unbroken development, attempts to find a single unitary origin of the thing, and functions as a legitimizing or naturalizing force.22 Geuss argues that ‘tracing a pedigree’ has five characteristics that genealogy opposes. First, tracing a pedigree is interested in the positive evaluation of the thing in question. Second, it starts with a singular origin. Third, it interprets that singular origin as though it is the source of the value of the thing whose pedigree is being traced. Fourth, it establishes an unbroken linear development for that singular origin to the thing itself. Fifth, it assumes that in its development the thing maintains or preserves (or even enhances) its positive value that was posited at the outset.23 By contrast, for Nietzsche,
… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consists of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or obliterated.24
For this reason Nietzsche doubts that the purpose of law can help us understand the history of the emergence of law. He posits this as the most important proposition of historical research.25 Similarly, Foucault emphatically asserts that:
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of people.
By contrast, as with Nietzsche, Foucault affirms that
… to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us …26
If genealogy attempts to delineate multiple lines of descent, reveals indirect, fragmented and fractured lines of development, eschews single origins and is critical rather than legitimizing, it is particularly useful for genuine comparisons since it does not begin with an already-assigned value of a thing. If genealogy aims to focus on problematizations that mobilize a thing and how these assemble strategies and technologies appropriate to governing it, it is particularly useful for cross-cultural comparisons since it does not begin with an already-defined scope for a thing.
It can be argued that Weber was the first serious student of Nietzschean genealogy before Foucault.27 This makes it even more important to investigate not only his thoughts on the development of citizenship through cross-cultural comparisons but also how he arrived at them. In his earlier work he argued that ‘a genuinely analytic study comparing the stages of development of the ancient polis with those of the medieval city would be welcome and productive’. 28 Yet, what is even more revealing is that he cautioned against gross comparisons:
Of course, such a comparative study would not aim at finding ‘analogies’ and ‘parallels’, as is done by those engrossed in the currently fashionable enterprise of constructing general schemes of development. The aim should, rather, be precisely the opposite: to identify and define the individuality of each development, the characteristics which made the one conclude in a manner so different from that of the other. This done, one can then determine the causes which led to these differences.29
Was Weber drawing a similar contrast between pedigree and genealogy as Foucault did much later in the twentieth century? Clearly, Weber was aware of the pitfalls of ‘comparison’ and thought that a ‘genuinely’ analytic comparison would involve careful consideration of differences of descent and development.
A further discussion of genealogy and its trajectories through Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault would require another occasion than this chapter. It must be emphasized, however, that genealogy is not ‘merely’ a method (otherwise it would raise questions about using a ‘western’ theoretical method to attempt overcoming orientalism) but also a perspective – a perspective that questioned Christian values in the development of knowledge about the West and the East. Genealogy documents the origins, emergence and development of values, or rather, the value of values and it itself originated as a way to understand Christian morals as values.30 Nietzsche expressed this early when he said ‘if Christianity has done everything to orientalize the occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it again: which in a certain sense means making of Europe’s mission and history a continuation of the Greek’.31 It is also important to remember that Said’s Orientalism was made possible by his encounter with Nietzsche and Foucault.32 Thus, the insistence on genealogy has both methodological and political aspects.
Ottoman citizenship as gift-giving acts
‘Citizenship after orientalism’ is about rethinking that subject called the ‘citizen’ without orientalist or Eurocentric assumptions. The citizen both in name and practice existed long before there was a debate on human rights or even democracy. It is well worth remembering that Ancient Greeks invented ‘citizenship’ before they invented various forms of government such as ‘oligarchy’, ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’. Similarly, citizenship as both status and practice existed in medieval and early modern Europe long before democracy, let alone liberal democracy of the nineteenth century. Perhaps more importantly, rights-bearing subjects existed without the name ‘citizens’ before Greco-Roman polities. Yet, since the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the discourse on citizenship has interpreted it as a uniquely occidental invention without pedigree or lineage beyond those aspects of history that is considered occidental. As we shall see below, it also interpreted citizenship as the origins of capitalism.
The relationship between orientalism and citizenship has not received the attention it deserves in either postcolonial or citizenship studies. It is well known that orientalism involves dividing the world into two ‘civilizational’ blocs, one having rationalized and secularized and hence modern, and the other having remained religious, if not factitious, and hence traditional. Some scholars have demonstrated how the orient has been produced as representations especially in occidental art and literature. Others have argued that what was produced was not only representations but also the orient itself, materializing through orientalizing discourses. Some scholars have argued that indeed Said (in his Orientalism book) was ambiguous on the difference between the orient as representation and the orient as real, sometimes assuming that the orient was simply the former, sometimes assuming that it was a distorted version of the latter.33 Moreover, Said was more insistent on orientalism as a dominant and dominating discourse rather than focusing on it as a relation. What concerns me is that for orientalizing discourses the essential difference between the occident and the orient can be partially attributed to citizenship understood as a contractual arrangement amongst unencumbered and sovereign citizens, associated with each other and capable of acting collectively, and creating modern capitalism. In other words, we are not concerned with how the orient was represented but how a difference was produced through orientalizing practices involving both occidental and oriental genealogies and geographies. It is this relationship between citizenship and orientalism that has not engaged scholarship. The reasons for this neglect is complex and the fact that Said, whose book was so influential in instigating studies on orientalism, did not concern himself with orientalism in the social sciences may have contributed to this.34 As Fred Halliday has recently argued, the orientalism of humanities rather than social sciences still dominates scholarship.35
It is open to debate whether Weber was an ‘orientalist’.36 Again, what concerns us is not to enter into that debate but to acknowledge the fact that his interpretation of citizenship as a distinctly western institution inaugurates a social science tradition where the origins of ‘city’, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’ are etymologically traced to the ‘Greek’, ‘Roman’ and ‘medieval’ cities and affinities between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ practices are established and juxtaposed against oriental societies – Indian, Chinese and Islamic – as societies that failed to develop citizenship and hence indigenous capitalism. As social scientists we now often insist that polis, politics and polity, civitas, citizenship and civility, and demos and democracy have ‘common roots’. We often provide images of virtuous Greek citizens debating in the agora or ecclesia, austere Roman citizens deliberating in the forum or the senate, and ‘European’ citizens receiving their charter as a symbol of contract in front of the guildhall. Moreover, the modern European nation-state claims inheritance of this invented tradition. As Weber would claim, ‘the modern [European] state is the first to have the concept of the citizen of the state’ according to which
the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular professional and family position he occupies, not in relation to differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen.37
When Weber says ‘everywhere else’, he has in mind specific geographies of orientalism: the orient. These images we provide following Weber then do not just invent one, but two, traditions: a superior way of being political as ‘simple and pure citizen’ and an inferior tradition that never sorted out the contractual state or the citizen. What these images mobilize is an invented tradition: that the occident is somehow an inheritor of a unified tradition that is distinct and superior to an oriental tradition. All the same, these images provoke and assemble an ‘occidental citizenship’. For the occidental imagination some images are now such ways of seeing: that democracy was invented in the Greek polis; that the Roman republican tradition bequeathed its legacy to Europe and that Europe Christianized and civilized these traditions. The image of the virtuous citizen is ineluctably linked with the occidental tradition whether it is told through political thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine, Locke and Rousseau or through narrating epic battles where citizenship virtues were discovered. While in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this narrative was told as a seamless web, constituting an occidental tradition of citizenship, in much of the twentieth century, its seamlessness was called into question, with liberalism, republicanism or communitarianism claiming different strands as their own. Yet, until the present, this narrative has held its sway: liberalism,38 republicanism or communitarianism,39 are really different ways of telling the same occidental narrative. Many tenets of orientalism in the social sciences regarding citizenship either rely upon or reproduce this one essential difference between the occident and the orient.
This is why Freeden’s challenge to political theory as discussed earlier is ‘formidable’. For when we begin to think across cultures we realize that we have actually been thinking across cultures but in orientalist ways. To abandon orientalism has significant stakes in challenging not only the ostensible universalism of some of the most coveted concepts of political theory but also demonstrating their orientalist origins as unique occidental achievements. It turns out that Freeden’s challenge is nothing less than pulling the rug out from under political theory as we practise it in western (and westernized) academic centres and circles. To recall Nietzsche, the challenge for genuinely cross-cultural political thinking is perhaps to refuse both occidentalizing the orient and orientalizing the occident.
I have attempted such a comparison by investigating Ottoman civic gift-giving as acts of citizenship.40 This research focused on an Islamic institution known as waqf (pl. awqaf) through which many Ottoman social services were provided. The most revealing aspect of this research was its illustration of what Freeden calls ‘thinking politically’ in deeds that were drawn up by benefactors laying out the foundation of the waqf and the ways in which it was to be governed and managed. Such deeds were acts in both social and legal meanings of the term and it enabled subjects to constitute themselves as political.
The focus on deeds (or acts) by Ottoman women has been especially illuminating. The dominant image of Ottoman women as ‘oriental subjects’ suggests that they were passive. The prevailing image of Ottoman women portrays them as veiled, out of sight and out of depth. Similarly, the dominant image of the Ottoman city as a species of ‘oriental city’ suggests that it lacked civic identity and collective institutions.41 The waqf as a gift-giving practice of solidarity and the active role women played in founding and maintaining waqf endowments as benefactors belie both images. While there has been considerable research published on women and waqf, by moving beyond investigating or interpreting the ostensible motives that are always intertwined with women’s role as ‘family caretakers’, I attempted to argue that, interpreted as acts of piety, awqaf became institutions by which women cultivated (in themselves and others) civic identities, and articulated solidarities as citizens of and for their cities. The deeds that they enacted understood both as their acts of piety and their laws expressed the will to become subjects. I have interpreted these acts as articulations of the will to constitute themselves as citizens. Yet this does not mean that women were citizens in the way in which modern (orientalist) citizenship is understood. Nor were they civic in the way in which the modern city is understood. To make either of those assertions would amount to reverse orientalism in the sense that we would recognize certain practices as citizenship only if they conformed to already-understood western norms. Rather, to suggest that Ottoman women were able to act as citizens (or right-bearers or claimants) means that I explored possibilities of interpreting their acts of piety as different acts of citizenship and thus reconsidering whether this difference can illuminate what modern citizenship and civic identities might mean in contemporary societies.
But why interpret the waqf as civic gift-giving? What is the relationship between civic gift-giving and citizenship? To answer these questions we need to briefly discuss French historian Paul Veyne’s work on ‘euergetism’ to delineate specifically Greco-Roman civic gift-giving. The word itself was not used as such by either the Greeks or the Romans but was created from the wording of the honorific decrees of the Hellenistic period by which cities honoured persons who did good to the city. The general word for benefaction was euergesia.42 For Veyne, euergetism means that cities expected the wealthy to contribute to public expenses. The question is what compelled the rich to give so spontaneously and willingly? While it may have been a noble virtue to give, Veyne insists that euergetism must be distinguished from patronage, ostentatious consumption, immortalization, charity, alms, investment in public offices, and, above all, liturgies. While euergetism shared a lineage with all these forms of gift-giving and incorporated elements into its workings, it is not reducible to any of them.43 Veyne argues that euergetism was also not a tax by any other name and that it was not a system of redistribution. It was not merely a response to debt, slavery and inequality. Rather, euergetism was a gift to the city, a civic gift that was meant for the entire city and its inhabitants, citizens as well as non-citizens.44 The importance of this is that euergetism created a unique tradition of competition for gift giving and citizens and non-citizens alike began interpreting these gifts as due to them. The ‘failure’ to give had social and political consequences. For Veyne this is how an ostensibly ‘individual’ quality, munificence, became a public institution, beneficence; he concludes, ‘beneficence creates the benefactor, and not the opposite’.45
It is this transformation from munificence to beneficence and how it creates the subject position of benefactor that becomes crucial for interpreting the waqf as an act of citizenship. For if citizenship is an institution that regulates and modulates the relationship between subjects, citizens and governors (the most basic definition of citizenship being the capacity to rule and being ruled) and if civic gift-giving simultaneously creates both obligations and rights through expectations, then it is possible to argue that the waqf as a civic gift-giving practice must have created similar expectations. There is considerable evidence that the waqf became just such a modulating institution with the expectation to deliver public services. The most overwhelming evidence is that the waqf, rather than being an irregular practice, became a systematic mechanism of governing cities by providing various services in planned zones (külliye or imaret) through which a definitive shape was given to them. It is impossible to imagine Ottoman Istanbul without Süleymaniye, Fatih, Şehzade, Eyüp Sultan and Lâleli külliyes as zones for regulating, maintaining, enhancing and controlling circulation of bodies, uses, needs and exchanges. Throughout the empire, thousands of madrasas, schools, libraries, mosques, caravanserais, commercial centres (hans), bazaars, fountains, bridges, hospitals, soup kitchens or almshouses, lodges, tombs, baths and aquaducts were founded either as part of such külliyes or imarets or as stand-alone buildings. Awqaf could include immovable property such as rural land, which yielded income, as well as movable property, such as cash, books and other valuables. Taken together the ‘waqf system’, as it came to be designated, comprised a significant component of both economy and society.46 It certainly became much more widespread and systematic than its religious or philanthropic interpretation would appreciate. As Kuran says, ‘The reason the waqf is considered an expression of piety is that it is governed by a law considered sacred, not that its activities are inherently religious or that its benefits must be confined to Muslims’.47
The other overwhelming evidence to support the contention that the waqf, as a gift-giving act, functioned to regulate subject, citizen and governor relations is its ‘authority structure’. The formation, approval and authorization of awqaf were left to local courts and there was minimal central juridical control over these foundations for centuries, especially in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was only in the nineteenth century that awqaf were brought under central control with uncertain success.48 For most its history founding a waqf meant endowing privately held property for public use in perpetuity for functions set out in its founding deed (vakfiye; waqfiyya) and according to the conditions specified therein. The waqf deed also set out the way in which the property would be administered and maintained. The deed was registered and authenticated by a local judge (kadı; qadi) and did not require further approval. The principles underlying the waqf, then, were self-sufficiency, perpetuity, autonomy and beneficence. Amongst waqf founders were prominent sultans, sultanas, pashas, as well as much less prominent members of the Ottoman governing and merchant elite. More significantly, there were notable numbers of women and non-Muslim waqf founders.
The comparison between waqf and euergetism as civic gift-giving acts is an attempt at genuinely cross-cultural comparison. It raises many questions about their convergent and divergent genealogies. We will now broaden this research and investigate similar practices that have hitherto been interpreted either as insignificant or even contra-citizenship in both occidental and oriental cultures. Such practices in Indian, Chinese, Islamic and indigenous societies need to be staged in a genuinely comparative context. The objective is to start with Weber and move beyond his assumptions and investigate practices that display features and characteristics of citizenship understood as the negotiation of differences amongst (and sometimes within) social groups. Following Veyne’s findings on euergetism in Greco-Roman cities where the elite felt obliged to make civic gifts to the city, I illustrated that similar (though not identical) practices existed in Ottoman cities with waqf foundations. By staging euergetism and waqf together the aim was to illustrate that practices have genealogies and geographies that intersect, connect, and inform each other in unexpected and surprising ways. What other practices can we recover from India, China, Africa and indigenous histories with similar effects but with different trajectories?
Genealogical investigations: India, China, Africa and indigenous peoples
To conduct genealogical investigations about various citizenship practices in Western, Indian, Chinese, Islamic and indigenous histories as comparative historical sociological studies is a difficult task. There are issues of translation not understood as transcription or transliteration but as rendition and transference. If, for example, the concept and term has not been used in these histories, would there still be a legitimate use of ‘citizenship’ to describe them? When studying waqf I responded to that question affirmatively, but it will depend on the practices studied and acts interpreted to make that transference possible and effective. Similarly, without having an overall perspective on the knowledge accumulated by these cross-cultural practices, what will the knowledge of these practices (and acts) amount to? Is it enough to bring into light practices hitherto remaining as hidden or concealed from view at least as citizenship practices and acts? One of the risks of cross-cultural genealogical investigations is that we cannot answer these questions until after we conduct them. To recall Freeden, to investigate how thinking politically is embedded in certain citizenship practices and acts and how political thinking about them is articulated in various texts is only the starting point. Such investigations will have to make two moves. First, a negative move through which we recover and illustrate how those citizenship practices and acts that were conceived by orientalism to be absent were indeed present, albeit in forms that we were not able to perceive when viewed from orientalist perspectives. The argument, for example, that Ottoman cities ‘lacked’ civic identity can be called into question by investigating various practices that indeed had given civic consciousness to its inhabitants, if not ‘citizens’, by enabling them to constitute themselves as both benefactors and beneficiaries. Second, a positive move through which we begin to assemble practices and acts that can be considered as citizenship but not in ways that we have already configured and understood. To investigate euergetism and waqf together becomes an instance of this move.
Consider, for example, an argument that Weber made about China: that sibs (kinship groups) impeded the development of confraternization and therefore the city as an association in ancient China did not develop.49 We will need to review scholarship on modern China and how citizenship is conceived.50 Can we establish affinities between forms of thinking politically in guilds and sibs? Various possible genealogies of sibs within Chinese traditions can be indicated and a genealogy of a practice of political thinking can be undertaken as an illustration of how a different understanding of citizenship could have developed. When Weber was writing in 1920 that the Chinese lacked a conception of citizenship at least understood as a collective, Mao Zedong was addressing the Chinese and saying ‘Citizens Arise!’51 Genealogies of gongmin (public-people), guomin (state-people) and shimin (city-people) that came into use in the nineteenth century and the ways in which they came to constitute the conflicting origins of modern Chinese citizenship are still awaiting interpretation against orientalism.
Again, consider Weber’s argument that in ancient India caste impeded the development of citizenship-as-confraternization and that citizenship practices emerged only with British colonization.52 Weber cast a long shadow on interpretations of caste and the role it played in impeding citizenship and capitalism.53 As Kantowsky illustrated, the translation of Weber’s work has had a misleading history that itself impeded our understanding of caste and its relationship to citizenship. Instead, Weber has been incorporated into 1960s-style ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ studies and has been portrayed as almost a neocolonialist, advocating widespread adoption of Western institutions, including citizenship for Indian modernization. Genealogies of not only the way in which citizenship emerged in India but also the way in which layers of interpretation that constructed an India that required Western modernization would contribute to the work that subaltern studies has already initiated.54
As Turner illustrated, Weber thought that ‘fissiparousness’ impeded the development of the city as an association in ancient Islamic societies and that modern Islamic societies are under the burden of these ancient origins.55 Research can indicate various possible genealogies of the conception of rights, both human and citizen, within Islamic traditions and societies that can belie such an assumption. I have already illustrated this with Ottoman awqaf as acts of citizenship. A possibility exists here to undertake research on non-Ottoman awqaf in Indonesia, Malaysia, or Singapore. Another possibility is to focus on the development of rights, especially ‘human’ rights in Islamic jurisprudence and its relationship to citizenship.56
Indigenous peoples have not been orientalized explicitly but they appear to be peoples without political subjectivity. For this reason for some scholars ‘indigenous citizenship’ is a contradiction in terms and it involves incorporation of exogenous (colonial) institutions into societies where such concepts not only did not exist but also were hostile to indigenous practices.57 Others argue that indeed indigenous societies are now deeply embedded in human rights and citizenship rights regimes and that it is possible to conceive a kind of citizenship that can be called ‘indigenous citizenship’.58 The significance of this debate for citizenship after orientalism is that during the formation of the Judeo-Christian conception of citizenship, indigenous peoples did not even appear as peoples with histories and thus traditions. The debates about indigenous human rights and citizenship rights throw into sharp relief some of the orientalist assumptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while displaying all the difficulties of defining an indigenous regime of rights without it. This is really the first step toward an opening. After examining Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian conceptions of human and citizen, the objective would then be to connect postcolonial studies with indigenous studies from the perspective of the relationship between human and citizenship rights.
Conclusion
This chapter attempts to illustrate how we might respond to Freeden’s challenge to practise cross-cultural political theory that focuses on both political thinking embedded in everyday practices (and acts) and thinking about politics that arise from and are, related but not reducible, to such political thinking. I have drawn from ongoing research on citizenship as political subjectivity in which I have been trying to outline a conception of citizenship that is not dependent upon an orientalist assumption of its uniqueness in the West and that draws on cross-cultural contrasts and comparisons. In the field of citizenship studies that has emerged in the past twenty years the orientalist origins of citizenship are neither acknowledged nor even debated. If Freeden thinks that cross-cultural theorizing about politics in general is in its infancy, we suggest that cross-cultural theorizing about citizenship is struggling to be born.59
Notes
1 See E.F. Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
2 See E.F. Isin, ‘Engaging, Being, Political’, Political Geography. 24 (2005), pp.373–387.
3 See E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, (eds) E.F. Isin and B.S. Turner (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 117–128.
4 Max Weber, The Religion of India, trans. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1917), p.103.
5 See M.R. Nafissi (1998) ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society. 27, (1), (1998), pp. 97–118; B.S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
6 See J. Love, ‘Max Weber’s Orient’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Weber, (ed.), S.P. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.172–199.
7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p.259.
8 See J.M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
9 See Barry Hindess, ‘Citizenship and Empire’, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, (eds) T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 241–256.
10 See C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000) and C. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).
11 See E.F. Isin, ‘Ottoman Awqaf, Turkish Modernization, and Citizenship’, in Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracy, (ed.), E.F. Keyman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp.3–15; also E.F. Isin, ‘Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awqaf and “Other” Subjects’, in: The Other Global City, (ed.), S. Mayaram (London: Routledge, 2009).
12 Michael Freeden, ‘What Should the “Political” in Political Theory Explore?’, Journal of Political Philosophy. 13, (2), (2005), pp.113–134; also Freeden, ‘Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking’, Journal of Political Ideologies. 12, (1), (2007), pp.1–9; Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking About Politics: Language, Interpretation, and Ideology’, in: Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, (eds) D. Leopold and M. Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.196–215.
13 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, p.1. See also the Introduction to this volume.
14 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, p.1.
15 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, pp.2–3.
16 Freeden, ‘What Should the “Political”’, p.115.
17 See Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically’.
18 E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen’, Subjectivity, (29), (2009), pp. 367–388.
19 E.F. Isin, ‘Who Is the New Citizen? Toward a Genealogy’, Citizenship Studies. 1, (1), (1997) 115–132; Isin, Being Political; Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’; Isin, ‘Beneficence and Difference’.
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1887]); Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998 [1971]); Y. Sherratt, Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
21 R. Visker, ‘Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology’, Parrhesia. 5, (2008), pp.9–18.
22 Raymond Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’, in: Nietzsche, (eds) J. Richardson and B. Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 322–340; Sherratt, Continental Philosophy, p.137.
23 Geuss, ‘Nietzsche’, p.324.
24 Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy’, p.55.
25 Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy’, p.55.
26 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy’, p.146.
27 D. Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge, 1994); Tracy B. Strong, ‘”What Have We to Do with Morals?” Nietzsche and Weber on History and Ethics’, History of the Human Sciences. 5, (3) (1994), pp. 9–18.
28 Max Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R.I. Frank (London: New Left Books, 1909), p.385.
29 Weber, Agrarian Sociology, p. 385.
30 R. Guay, ‘The Philosophical Function of Genealogy’, in: A Companion to Nietzsche, (ed.), K. Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp.355–357.
31 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 [1878]), p.175.
32 D.M. Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, Publications on the near East (Seattle, WA; London, University of Washington Press, 2007).
33 M. Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.15–20.
34 B.S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); B.S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978); B.S. Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Orientalism’, in: Orientalism: Early Sources, (ed.), B.S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.1–31.
35 Fred Halliday, ‘Orientalism, Empire and Eccentricity’, Archives Europeennes De Sociologie. 47, (3), (2006), p.488.
36 Love, ‘Max Weber’s Orient’, pp.172–199; also M.R. Nafissi, ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society. 27, (1), (1998), pp. 97–118.
37 Weber, Religion of India, p.103.
38 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
39 See Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
40 See E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’; Isin, ‘Ottoman Awqaf’.
41 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, trans. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1921]), pp. 1223–1224, 1233.
42 P. Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, trans. B. Pearce (London: Penguin, 1990 [1976]), p.10.
43 Veyne, Bread and Circuses, pp. 18–19.
44 Veyne, Bread and Circuses, pp. 94–95.
45 P. Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 203–204.
46 See M. Çizakça, A History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World from the Seventh Century to the Present (Istanbul: Bogaziçi University Press, 2000); N. Öztürk, Türk Yenileşme Tarihi Çerçevesinde Vakıf Müessesesi (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995).
47 T. Kuran, ‘The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of Waqf System’, Law & Society Review. 35, (4), (2001), p. 842.
48 See Öztürk, Türk Yenileşme.
49 See O.B.V.D. Sprenkel, ‘Max Weber on China’, History and Theory. 3, (3), (1964), pp. 348–370.
50 P. Harris, ‘The Origins of Modern Citizenship in China’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint. 43, (2), (2000), pp. 181–203.
51 Harris ‘The Origins’, p.181.
52 H. Gorringe, ‘The Caste of the Nation: Untouchability and Citizenship in South India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 42, (1), (2008), pp. 123–149.
53 D. Kantowsky (1982) ‘Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 16, (2), (1982), pp.141–174.
54 See D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
55 See Turner, Weber and Islam and Marx and the End of Orientalism.
56 M.I. Malik, ‘The Concept of Human Rights in Islamic Jurisprudence’, Human Rights Quarterly. 3, (3) (1981), pp. 56–67.
57 See T. Biolsi, ‘Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle’, American Ethnologist. 32, (2), (2005), pp.239–259.
58 See N. Peterson and W. Sanders, Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
59 See Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking About Politics’.