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Orientalism in the Mirror

The Sexual Politics of Anti-Westernism

Department of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, Centre for Biomedicine and Society at Kings College, London

This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of Islamist philosophies of finance, the article suggests that Islamic political theology is unique in its ability to separate absolute law from territory (pace Schmitt). Transgressing the boundaries of nation-state postcolonialism, it thereby relocates absolute value, and hence absolute prohibition, in the realm of the sexual and the divine.

Key Words: capitalism • imperialism • Islam • neoliberalism • postcolonialism • sexuality • theology

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