What October 7 revealed about Western Islam studies
Thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring Israel “entirely responsible” for the attack...
What October 7 Revealed About Western Islamic Studies
On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas killed approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel in the single deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, students at universities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia gathered to celebrate. The same mindless drones who belch inclusivity chants and DEI slogans were cheering for the death of the middle east minorities.
They did not gather to mourn over the death of civilians, Not to grieve. Not to cautiously observe. To celebrate death and the hate that united them.
At Cornell, a lecturer told a crowd he found the attack “exhilarating” and “energizing.” At Harvard, thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring Israel “entirely responsible” for the attack before the bodies had been identified. Feminists were blaming the victims of rape. At Sydney and at London and at Toronto, rallies were held, flags were burned, slogans were chanted, and the people attending them were, in large numbers, students and faculty of institutions that have spent decades educating the West about Islam.
I am not interested, for the purposes of this piece, in the politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict. What interests me is the diagnostic question. What does the response of Western academic Islamic studies to October 7 tell us about the state of that discipline? What did the stress test reveal about the thesis that has been its governing assumption for thirty years?
The thesis, stated plainly, is this: political Islam and its violent expressions are fringe phenomena, deviations from an otherwise moderate tradition, produced by political grievance, colonial legacy, and economic deprivation rather than by doctrinal content. The mainstream of the field has held this thesis with remarkable consistency since at least the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, which reframed the academic study of Islam as a project of Western cultural domination and made the critical examination of Islamic doctrine a form of racism rather than a form of scholarship.
October 7 was a stress test of that thesis. Not the first. But perhaps the most revealing.
What the Field Was Built to Prevent
To understand what October 7 revealed, you have to understand what the academic Islamic studies establishment was built, over several decades, to prevent.
It was built to prevent the examination of doctrinal content as a causal factor in political outcomes.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the stated intellectual position of the dominant school within the field. Said’s argument in Orientalism was that Western scholars studying Islam were not doing scholarship. They were doing ideology, constructing a distorted image of “the Orient” as backward, violent, and irrational in order to justify colonial domination. The appropriate response to this distortion, the field concluded, was to treat doctrinal content as largely irrelevant to political analysis and to explain all Islamic political behavior through the lens of Western interference, political economy, and postcolonial grievance.
The result was a field that became structurally incapable of asking the question the evidence kept demanding: whether the outcomes of Islamic governance, violence, repression, legal inequality, the persistent fragility of pluralism, the asymmetric treatment of apostasy and blasphemy and minority rights, arise despite the doctrinal system or because of it.
That question was not merely discouraged. In many of its major journals, leading departments, and most cited figures, it was classified as the wrong kind of question. To ask it was to risk the accusation of Islamophobia, which the field had helped construct as a career-ending charge rather than a substantive intellectual rebuttal. The accusation did not refute the question. It silenced the questioner.
The practical consequence of this over three decades was that Western universities produced generation after generation of students, journalists, policymakers, and government analysts who understood Islam almost entirely through the lens of grievance and politics, with almost no serious engagement with the doctrinal architecture of the tradition. They knew about colonialism. They knew about the partition of Palestine. They knew about Western interventions in Muslim-majority countries. They knew almost nothing about abrogation, the doctrine of jihad as classical jurisprudence defines it, the structural difference between the Meccan and Medinan periods, or what the classical commentators say about the relationship between divine law and human legislation.
They were, in the language I use in The Two Muhammads, trained to observe outcomes while remaining systematically prevented from examining causes.
