Abdullah Laroui

Abdullah Laroui is a Moroccan historian and political theorist whose critique of Gustave von Grunebaum provides one of the book’s clearest examples of anti-Orientalist scholarship at work. Against an influential portrait of Islam as a culture incapable of innovation, Laroui identifies the repetitions and reductions that make a vast, varied history appear to be one unchanging system. His intervention matters not merely because it disputes von Grunebaum’s conclusions, but because it shows how scholarly categories can erase historical complexity while presenting that erasure as knowledge.

Identity and Critical Intervention

Edward Said presents Laroui as the only scholar to have undertaken a serious critique of von Grunebaum’s views. This distinction locates Laroui in a field where von Grunebaum’s work, despite its polemical character, had acquired the authority of canonical wisdom in American Middle East studies after the Second World War. Its standing rested in part on the cultural prestige associated with European scholars; Said emphasizes that the field accepted it uncritically even though it could no longer reproduce scholars of von Grunebaum’s kind.

Laroui’s role is therefore both specific and methodological. He does not simply offer a different general portrait of Islam: he examines the habits of thought that allow a detailed body of scholarship to remain reductive. Said describes his use of reductive repetition as a practical tool of critical anti-Orientalist study. The scrutiny falls on repeated descriptions and inherited interpretive premises, not on the quantity of material assembled. A work can be immense in detail and apparent range yet still constrain the subject it claims to explain.

The Single Islam and the Problem of Change

Laroui’s analysis begins with the adjectives von Grunebaum attaches to Islam, including “medieval,” “classical,” and “modern.” As Said recounts Laroui’s argument, these labels are neutral or superfluous because von Grunebaum does not use them to distinguish substantially different historical formations. The categories end up naming one Islam in different registers: classical Islam, medieval Islam, and Islam without qualification become versions of the same thing, changing only within itself.

That underlying sameness also shapes von Grunebaum’s account of modernity. Modern Islam is said to turn away from the West because it remains faithful to an original sense of itself. Yet, in this account, Islam can modernize only by reinterpreting itself from a Western point of view—a requirement that the account itself presents as impossible. The result is a closed explanatory circle: fidelity to an unchanging identity explains Islam’s resistance to change, while the prescribed Western route to change is treated as unavailable. Laroui’s critique makes visible how this structure can produce the conclusion that Islam is incapable of innovation before its histories have been adequately considered.

Said notes that the idea that Islam must use Western methods to improve itself had become almost a truism in Middle East studies, perhaps in part because of von Grunebaum’s influence. As an example, he cites David Gordon’s call for “maturity” among Arabs, Africans, and Asians, attainable, in Gordon’s argument, only through learning from Western objectivity. This example shows the wider reach of the assumptions Laroui exposes: the issue is not confined to the vocabulary of one scholar but extends to standards by which other societies are judged capable of development.

A Closed System and Its Historical Costs

Laroui also traces von Grunebaum’s use of A. L. Kroeber’s culturalist theory. In Said’s account, this framework entails reductions and eliminations through which Islam can be represented as a closed system of exclusions. Each diverse aspect of Islamic culture becomes a direct reflection of an invariant matrix, identified with a particular theory of God. Development, history, tradition, and reality consequently become interchangeable descriptions of that same matrix rather than distinct, changing dimensions of human life.

Laroui’s objection is historical as well as conceptual. History consists of complex sequences of events, different temporalities, and meanings; it cannot be reduced to a single notion of culture. Nor, in his reasoning as presented by Said, can culture be reduced to ideology or ideology to theology. These reductions flatten the relations among belief, social life, political action, and historical change. They convert a framework for interpreting evidence into a system that determines in advance what every piece of evidence must mean.

Said further explains the tension that von Grunebaum turns into a sign of deficiency. Islamic intellectual traditions may contain highly articulated theories of religion, politics, social structure, history, and economics while offering fewer accounts of religious experience, individualized actions, dated events, political documents, or quantified series. For von Grunebaum, those uneven records help sustain a vision of a culture unable to examine its existential reality. Laroui’s critique, as Said develops it, exposes the cost of that conclusion: absences or differences in the forms of available evidence become grounds for describing Islam as an unchanging whole, rather than occasions to investigate the particular historical conditions and meanings involved.

The resulting portrait, in Said’s account, resembles that of earlier European Orientalists: Islam appears monolithic, indifferent to ordinary human experience, reductive, and unchanging. Laroui’s method challenges that portrait by identifying the conceptual steps through which diversity is made to confirm unity. The problem is not simply an inaccurate adjective or isolated generalization; it is the repeated conversion of different histories and experiences into evidence for one predetermined cultural identity.

Political Stakes and Scholarly Significance

Said places this intellectual pattern in a political context. Von Grunebaum’s account, he argues, is political rather than impartially descriptive. Its hold on younger Orientalists derives partly from inherited authority and partly from its usefulness as a handle for grasping a vast region as a coherent phenomenon. Said connects the desire to make intellectually satisfying assertions about Islam with the difficulty of encompassing Islam politically within Western power, and with the open opposition to Western imperialism expressed by Arab nationalism after the Second World War. On this reading, the conceptual closure Laroui diagnoses has practical significance: it makes an immense and internally varied field appear readily knowable as a single object.

Laroui’s critique thus intervenes at the point where scholarly classification meets political judgment. By showing how a theory can transform variety into sameness and historical change into the repetition of an essence, it contests more than a particular account of Islamic culture. It challenges a mode of knowledge that claims explanatory command while excluding the complexity that would unsettle its categories. In Said’s presentation, Laroui’s importance lies in making that operation legible—and in demonstrating that criticism can test not only a scholar’s stated conclusions, but the repetitive structures that make those conclusions seem inevitable.