“WAHHABISM” AS A RHETORICAL FOIL 3 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Die Welt des Islams 44, 1 Also available online – www.brill.nl A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER: “WAHHABISM” AS A RHETORICAL FOIL BY ALEXANDER KNYSH Michigan “We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse—in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just begin- ning to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself…A task consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or repre- sentations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.” Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, 48-49. Prologue In the giant body of literature on the political developments along Russia’s southern border over the past decade, one cannot help but be struck by the frequency with which “Wahhabism” and/or “Wah- habi” Islam is invoked by Western and Russian journalists, academ- ics, and political analysts as the principal cause of troubles and political instability in these areas. 1 This is especially true of the Muslim areas of the Northern Caucasus and Central Asia, although 1 For some typical examples see: Muriel Atkin, “The Rhetoric of Islamophobia,” Central Asia and the Caucasus , 1 (2000), 123-132; Marat Murtazin, “Muslims and Russia: war or peace?” ibid., 132-141; Svante Cornell and Regine Spector, “Central Asia: More than Islamic extremists,” The Washington Quarterly , 25/1 (Winter 2002), 193-206; Olga Bibikova, “Fenomen ‘vakhkhabizma’,” Aziia i Afrika segodnia, 8 (1999), 48-52; Vakhit Akaev, Sufizm i vakhkhabizm na Severnom Kavkaze, Issledovaniia po