John Esposito challenged Orientalism but left an unfinished question about Islam, the modern state, and the limits of post-Orientalist thought.

Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj

John L. Esposito, arguably the most influential American scholar of Islam of his generation, died on 15 July 2026 at the age of 86, bringing to a close a scholarly career that spanned more than five decades. Few American academics did more to challenge the representation of Islam as an inherently threatening, irrational, or politically incompatible tradition. Esposito spent much of his career confronting precisely the assumptions that had shaped Western scholarship and public discourse about Islam, particularly in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie affair, 9/11, and the rise of the so-called “clash of civilizations.” His death has therefore generated a deserved wave of recognition, including Nader Hashemi’s description of him as a scholar who “transformed how the West understood Islam,” while Tamara Sonn’s Overcoming Orientalism explicitly situated his intellectual legacy in relation to Edward Said and the Orientalist tradition.

Yet the most interesting question surrounding Esposito’s legacy is not whether he challenged Orientalism. He plainly did. The more difficult question is whether he actually escaped the intellectual architecture that Orientalism helped construct. Some scholars have described him as “post-Orientalist,” arguing that his work moved beyond the stereotypes identified by Said and allowed Islam and Muslims to speak on their own terms. Muqtedar Khan, for example, places Esposito among the leading post-Orientalist scholars, while Sonn’s volume Overcoming Orientalism makes the same broad argument. But there is another possibility: that Esposito dismantled some of Orientalism’s most visible assumptions while leaving one of its deeper foundations—the modern state and its political geography—largely intact. If that is the case, Esposito's reckoning with Orientalism was profound but unfinished.

This distinction matters because Orientalism cannot be reduced to negative representations of Islam. Wael Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism offers a more demanding standard. For Hallaq, Orientalism is embedded in the deeper intellectual structures of modernity, including liberalism, secularism, anthropocentric humanism, and the modern state. The question, therefore, is not simply whether a scholar likes or dislikes Muslims, represents Islam positively or negatively, or opposes Western prejudice. The more consequential question is whether the conceptual architecture through which Muslim societies are understood has itself been interrogated. By this measure, Esposito’s intellectual record becomes considerably more complicated. On liberalism and secularism, he often challenged Western assumptions with unusual force. On the modern state, however, his position appears much less radical.

Esposito’s intellectual journey makes this achievement particularly striking. Born in Brooklyn in 1940 into a working-class Italian-American Catholic family, he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Order as a teenager and spent approximately a decade preparing for the priesthood before leaving the seminary in 1964. His subsequent academic education in philosophy, theology, and religious studies eventually brought him to Temple University, where he encountered Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi. Faruqi became Esposito’s doctoral mentor and exerted an extraordinary influence on his understanding of Islam. Rather than approaching Islam simply as a religious tradition that had to be translated into Western secular categories, Esposito increasingly treated it as a comprehensive worldview whose political, social, ethical, and theological dimensions could not be artificially separated.

That intellectual formation helps explain why Esposito became such an important counterweight to the dominant Western discourse about Islam. After nearly two decades at the College of the Holy Cross, he moved to Georgetown University in 1993 and became founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. His institutional influence was matched by an enormous scholarly output, including Islam: The Straight Path, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Islam and Democracy, Unholy War, Who Will Speak for Islam?, and The Future of Islam, as well as major reference works such as the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, and The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. His influence also extended beyond the university: he advised governments and international institutions and served as a UN Alliance of Civilizations ambassador.

The case for calling Esposito post-Orientalist is therefore substantial. His central achievement was not merely that he wrote sympathetically about Islam. It was that he challenged the intellectual assumption that Islam could only become legitimate by approximating Western secular modernity. His critique of what he called “secular fundamentalism”—the assumption that modernisation necessarily entails secularisation—was especially significant. In his interpretation, tawhid, the oneness and sovereignty of God, could not be treated as an incidental theological proposition separated from political and social life. Islam's political vocabulary had to be understood from within its own intellectual and religious premises rather than evaluated exclusively through secular Western categories.

This was not merely an abstract scholarly position. Esposito was willing to defend it when doing so placed him against powerful currents of Western opinion. During the Rushdie controversy, he rejected the idea that the question could be reduced to a simple opposition between freedom of expression and religious intolerance. He argued that the limits of free speech could vary across religiocultural contexts, a position that placed him at odds with Edward Said, who defended Rushdie in uncompromising terms. The difference between the two scholars is revealing: Said's critique of Orientalism did not require him to abandon the secular intellectual commitments through which he approached the Rushdie controversy, whereas Esposito was more willing to question whether those commitments could legitimately claim universal status.

The same distinction appeared in Esposito’s treatment of political Islam. He was considerably less willing than many Western commentators to collapse Islamist movements into a single category of extremism. His later comments on Hamas and Palestinian resistance demonstrate a willingness to recognise the political and religious dimensions of movements that much of Western discourse approached primarily through the language of terrorism. This generated fierce criticism from neoconservative commentators, who accused him of being an apologist for militant Islam. Whatever one makes of those criticisms, they illustrate the extent to which Esposito departed from the dominant American interpretive framework of his time.

His Catholic background is important here, although not because it provides a simplistic explanation of his scholarship. Esposito's religious formation appears to have made him unusually sensitive to the possibility that secular liberalism was not an entirely neutral framework from which religion could be judged. His trajectory differed markedly from Said's secular intellectualism. Where Said increasingly located his critique of Western power within a secular intellectual tradition, Esposito was prepared to ask whether the secularisation of politics should itself be treated as the universal endpoint of modernity. That difference helps explain why Esposito could challenge Orientalist assumptions without necessarily adopting the secular premises that shaped much of postcolonial criticism.

Yet this is precisely where the notion of “post-Orientalism” begins to become problematic. If post-Orientalism is itself largely articulated within the intellectual vocabulary of postcolonialism and post-structuralism, then calling Esposito a post-Orientalist risks measuring him against a framework he had already moved beyond. Esposito's most distinctive contribution may therefore have been precisely his refusal to accept the assumption that Islam must be defended through the intellectual premises of secular Western modernity. In that sense, he arguably went further than the category of post-Orientalism ordinarily allows. He did not merely produce a more sympathetic image of Islam; he challenged the epistemological conditions under which Islam was being judged.

But the modern state presents a different story.

The strongest challenge to Esposito’s post-Orientalist status comes from Mohammad Samiei's study of “neo-Orientalism,” which places Esposito alongside Bernard Lewis and Gilles Kepel while nevertheless recognising that Esposito was considerably less dualistic than either. Samiei identifies an important qualification in Esposito’s thinking: his support for Muslim self-determination was expressed as extending only “to the extent that it does not directly threaten US interests.” Samiei ultimately regarded Esposito as an important example of solidarity with Muslims, but the qualification is analytically significant because it introduces a boundary around the principle of self-determination.

That boundary becomes more consequential when Esposito’s scholarship is examined through his treatment of the modern nation-state. His long engagement with American and European governments does not, by itself, demonstrate intellectual dependence on those governments. Scholars routinely enter policymaking institutions precisely because they hope to influence them. The deeper issue is conceptual rather than institutional: Esposito's analysis of Islamic political movements repeatedly treats the existing nation-state as the normal and legitimate container of political life.

This assumption appears explicitly in his work with John Voll, where they argue that the borders of independent nation-states are highly significant in defining the identity, leadership, and activities of contemporary Islamic movements. Their analysis of movements such as Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood similarly emphasises their adaptation to national political systems. Political Islam becomes intelligible, and often legitimate, insofar as it operates through elections, parliaments, constitutional structures, and national sovereignty.

The distinction becomes particularly sharp when Esposito discusses transnational movements. Al-Qaeda is presented not merely as violent but as fundamentally transnational in its identity, recruitment, ideology, strategy, targets, and organisational networks. The analytical contrast is therefore between movements that participate in national political structures and those that reject the nation-state framework in favour of a global political project. This is understandable from the perspective of contemporary security analysis, but from Hallaq’s perspective it raises a more fundamental question: why should the nation-state be presumed to be the legitimate political container in the first place?

Here the limitations of Esposito’s critique of colonialism become particularly visible. He was certainly willing to identify colonialism as a continuing source of political dysfunction across the Muslim world. In his discussions of Pakistan, Malaysia, and other cases, he traced institutions, developmental models, and relationships between religion and state to European colonial rule. But his critique generally stops at the institutional content of the postcolonial state. The state itself—the territorial borders, sovereign structures, and political geography inherited from the colonial order—is rarely subjected to the same level of interrogation. Colonialism explains why postcolonial states look and function as they do, but the modern state itself remains largely outside the critique.

This is precisely the point at which Hallaq's argument becomes useful. For Hallaq, the problem is not simply that Muslim societies were colonised and subsequently governed badly. The deeper problem is that the modern state embodies a conception of sovereignty that is structurally different from the moral and legal order associated with the classical Islamic tradition. In the latter, political authority was embedded within a broader moral community and legal tradition rather than existing as an autonomous sovereign institution accountable primarily to itself. The modern state therefore cannot simply be treated as an empty institutional container into which Islamic politics can be inserted. Its very foundations matter.

This produces the central tension in Esposito's legacy. He rejected the Orientalist tendency to define Islam from outside. He resisted the assumption that Muslims had to secularise before becoming modern. He recognised the political legitimacy of religiously framed movements and challenged the reduction of Islam to a security problem. Yet when he assessed the political legitimacy of those movements, he largely returned to a political framework in which the nation-state remained the unquestioned horizon of legitimate action. The very framework that defines political possibility therefore escaped the scrutiny he applied to the ideological assumptions operating within it.

That does not make Esposito simply an Orientalist. Such a conclusion would flatten a remarkably complex intellectual career and would ignore the substantial ways in which his scholarship challenged Orientalist representations of Islam. Nor does it make every engagement with the nation-state inherently Orientalist. States remain powerful political realities, and scholars necessarily have to account for them. The more precise argument is that Esposito's critique of Orientalism was asymmetrical: he subjected representations of Islam to sustained critical scrutiny without applying the same degree of scrutiny to the political form through which modern Muslim societies were expected to organise themselves.

This distinction is important because Orientalism can survive without openly hostile representations of Muslims. A scholar does not have to describe Islam as irrational, primitive, violent, or backward in order to reproduce an Orientalist structure of knowledge. It can also operate through the more subtle assumption that Muslim political life becomes legitimate only when translated into categories already authorised by the modern state. In that sense, the question is not whether Esposito reproduced the Orientalist stereotypes he spent his career dismantling. The evidence suggests that he did much to undermine them. The question is whether some of the deeper political assumptions associated with that epistemological order survived beneath his otherwise sympathetic interpretation of Islam.

This is why “neo-Orientalist” is potentially useful—but only if employed carefully. It should not be understood as equating Esposito with Bernard Lewis or with the more openly antagonistic forms of Orientalist scholarship. The distinction matters. Esposito's scholarship was demonstrably less dualistic and considerably more sympathetic to Muslim political agency than much of the literature traditionally associated with Orientalism. The neo-Orientalist question instead concerns whether his acceptance of the modern nation-state as the normative framework of political legitimacy reproduced a structural assumption that his critique of Orientalist representations had otherwise escaped.

The result is therefore less a verdict than a paradox. Esposito came remarkably close to overcoming Orientalism precisely because he refused to accept the proposition that Islam needed to be reconstructed according to secular Western categories. His intellectual debt to al-Faruqi helped him treat Islam as a complete worldview rather than an incomplete version of Western modernity. In this respect, describing him simply as a more sympathetic Orientalist would be historically and intellectually misleading.

But his treatment of the modern state leaves the reckoning unfinished. He recognised the colonial origins of many political institutions without fully interrogating the territorial state itself as part of the colonial inheritance. He defended Muslim political participation but generally within national frameworks whose legitimacy he did not fundamentally question. And he recognised transnational Islamic movements as political phenomena while treating their rejection of the nation-state as a central source of danger.

Perhaps, then, the most productive description of Esposito is neither “post-Orientalist” nor “neo-Orientalist” in isolation. He was a scholar who broke decisively with Orientalism at the level of representation, but whose critique became less radical when it reached the political architecture of modernity itself. He challenged the way the West represented Islam without fully challenging the political map through which the West had come to organise the Muslim world.

That is not a dismissal of Esposito's achievement. It is precisely what makes his legacy worth reconsidering after his death. His importance lies not in having solved the problem of Orientalism once and for all, but in having moved the debate to a point where the next question becomes unavoidable: if Orientalism is more than prejudice, and if it is embedded in the structures through which modern knowledge and political authority are organised, then overcoming its representations is only the beginning.

The unfinished question Esposito leaves behind is therefore larger than whether he was a post-Orientalist. It is whether a scholar can fully escape Orientalism while continuing to take the modern nation-state—and its borders, sovereignty and political categories—as the unquestioned framework through which Muslim political life must be understood. Esposito challenged the Western image of Islam. The next generation must ask whether the Western political architecture surrounding that image deserves the same scrutiny.

That may ultimately be the most fitting intellectual obituary for John L. Esposito: not that he overcame Orientalism, and not that he remained trapped within it, but that he brought the critique considerably further—and left the most difficult part unfinished.

Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj is a researcher, geopolitical analyst, and international relations professional specializing in Iraq, the Kurdistan Region, and the wider Middle East. He is the founder and editor of Kurdish Policy Analysis (KPA), an independent digital publication providing evidence-based analysis of political, security, economic, energy, and geopolitical developments across the region.

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