John L. Esposito, arguably the most influential American scholar of Islam of his generation, passed away on 15 July 2026 at the age of 86. His career spanned five decades of trying to convince the American academy, policymakers, and the wider public that Islam was never the threat Orientalist scholarship had made it out to be. Tributes arrived quickly from all quarters, several remembering him as a scholar who had—as Hashemi (2026) puts it—“transformed how the West understood Islam”. Beneath that praise sits a specific claim, one that scholars have in fact made explicitly: that Esposito succeeded where Orientalist scholarship failed, genuinely “overcoming Orientalism” (Sonn 2021) itself. Some scholars went so far as to call him a “post-Orientalist” (Khan 2020) outright. This piece takes up that claim and asks a more critical question: whether Esposito’s scholarship, for all its achievements, also carries “neo-Orientalist” biases—a more sobering possibility that complicates the celebratory verdict in this obituary.
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To answer that question fairly, this piece borrows its measuring stick from Wael Hallaq’s (2018) Restating Orientalism. Hallaq argues that any genuine critique of Orientalism has to interrogate the very foundations on which the modernity project itself was built—among them liberalism, secularism, anthropocentric humanism, and the modern state (Hallaq 2018, 4). For Hallaq, the distinction between a “good Orientalist” and a “bad Orientalist” is largely irrelevant—Orientalism, he argues, does not hinge on whether its portrayal of Islam is positive or negative, but on how deeply it remains embedded in the same underlying thought-structure that is hegemonic in nature. In what follows, I apply each of these yardsticks—liberalism, secularism, anthropocentric humanism, and the modern state—to Esposito’s own track record to test which of these foundations his scholarship actually interrogates, and which it leaves untouched, before arriving at a verdict on whether “post-Orientalist” or “neo-Orientalist” better describes him.
Before turning to the core of that argument, it is worth pausing on how Esposito arrived at the study of Islam in the first place—an unexpected trajectory in its own right. Born in 1940 to a working-class Italian-American family in Brooklyn, New York, he was raised in a devout Catholic household and, as a young teenager, entered the Capuchin Franciscan Order at the age of fourteen. He spent a decade preparing for the priesthood before leaving the seminary in 1964, without ordination, to pursue graduate study instead. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy from St. Anthony College (1963) and an M.A. in Theology from St. John’s University (1966), before enrolling in Temple University’s doctoral programme in religious studies. It was there that he had a decisive encounter with Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi (1921–86), the distinguished Palestinian-American scholar of Islam, who accepted Esposito as his first doctoral student—an encounter that transformed Esposito’s intellectual trajectory toward the study of Islam completely (Esposito 2014).
After nearly two decades at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, Esposito moved to Georgetown University in Washington, DC in 1993, where besides his professorship he assumed the position as the founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He was the president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies (1989–1991), the Middle East Studies Association (1990), and the American Academy of Religion (2013)—a rare and interdisciplinary triad. His scholarly output, spanning more than seventy books, included major works such as Islam: The Straight Path (1988), The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (1992), Islam and Democracy (1996), Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (2002), Who Will Speak for Islam? (2008), and The Future of Islam (2010), alongside standard reference books he edited, such as The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), The Oxford History of Islam (1999), and The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003). Additionally, he was personally appointed by Kofi Annan as an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations initiative, and served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, several European and Asian governments, and a range of corporations, universities, and media organisations worldwide (Ward 2024, 263).
The case for Esposito as a post-Orientalist
Esposito’s standing as a “post-Orientalist” commands broad scholarly consensus. Tamara Sonn (2021, 3), who edited the volume Overcoming Orientalism in his honour, stated this explicitly: “If Said is known for identifying Orientalist stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, Esposito is known for undermining those stereotypes.” Muqtedar Khan (2020, 135) backs this up, treating Esposito as the leading figure of what he calls the “post-Orientalist” cohort—scholars whose real achievement lay not in writing more sympathetically about Muslims, but in “letting the Orient speak for itself,” a move that takes Esposito a step further than Said. It is also worth noting that Esposito was already dismantling “clash of civilizations” discourse against Islam even before Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996) gave the phrase its most controversial formulation—doing so in his Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Esposito 1995 [1992]).
Much of this owes to his intellectual formation under al-Faruqi, whose own project, the “Islamisation of Knowledge,” insisted Islam be treated as a complete and self-sufficient worldview rather than a faith waiting to be secularised into Western categories (Esposito and Voll 2001, 27; Esposito 2014). This shaped Esposito’s recurring argument against what he termed “secular fundamentalism”: the assumption, widespread among Western analysts, that modernisation necessarily requires secularisation (Esposito 1995, 249). Islamic polity, for Esposito, organises itself around tawhid, the sovereignty and oneness of God, which makes religion central to how Muslim societies are governed, contrary to secular presuppositions about the necessary separation of religion and politics (Esposito 1988).
Esposito did not shy away from taking bold, deeply unpopular stands in support of Muslims, even when the public sentiment ran decisively against them. During the Rushdie affair, he pushed back against the Western liberal consensus that framed the controversy as a simple defence of free expression against religious intolerance, insisting that “the limits of free speech may vary in different religiocultural contexts” (Esposito 1995, 224). Esposito’s position differed sharply from that of Edward Said, who unequivocally defended Rushdie, hailing him as “the intifada of the imagination”—a defence Said framed as the secular intellectual’s principled duty to stand against religious censorship (Said 1994, 260-261; Majed 2014).
A similar divergence marked their respective views on the role of Islam in resistance movements like those in Palestine. While Said dismissed Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “violent and primitive”, insisting such resistance was “not to my taste… not secular resistance” (Majed 2014, 93)—Esposito (2023) was far more accommodating of resistance movements that framed their politics in religious vocabulary, refusing to reduce Hamas to a purely terrorist label, and recognising its legitimate political role. Esposito’s willingness to defend these movements drew sustained criticism from neoconservative commentators in Washington and Tel Aviv, who branded him an “apologist for militant Islam” (Middle East Forum 2002).
Esposito’s own Catholic formation is not incidental to his scholarship on Islam but constitutive of it—a claim attested by his own colleagues at Georgetown (Prince Alwaleed Center 2026). He grew up Catholic and, according to some accounts, remained a “practising Catholic throughout his life” (Habib 2026). He was sensitive to the challenges Muslim societies faced in reconciling with modernity, a sensitivity that reflected Catholicism’s own historical wariness of the Enlightenment’s secular-liberalism. Said, by contrast, a “self-proclaimed secular intellectual” and a “lapsed Anglican” (Walhout 2001), had already exited the Protestant tradition he was raised in, for the very secularism that the same tradition helped produce. That is, on the question of whether secular-liberal standards—despite their claim to neutrality—should govern how Muslim politics gets judged, Esposito refuses a framework Said never stepped outside of. The distinction here is not one of degree; Esposito simply declined to accept the terms that Said took as his starting point.
Given this, Esposito’s record on three of Hallaq’s four variables—liberalism, secularism, and anthropocentric humanism—supports the “post-Orientalist” label rather comfortably. Yet the label itself, however well earned, may actually do Esposito a grave disservice if applied without qualifications. “Post-Orientalism” is not a philosophically neutral category: it descends from postcolonial discourse, itself indebted to post-structuralism’s anti-foundationalist turn against the Enlightenment ideals it grew disillusioned with (for more, see Al-Ali 2000, 23). Nash et al. (2014, 3–4) press the point further, arguing that post-Orientalism’s embeddedness within a secular epistemology that is “predominantly Western” eventually translates into overt antagonism toward “Islam as a religion, Muslims as individuals, and Muslim communities as collectives.” To call Esposito “post-Orientalist,” then, is to measure him by a yardstick built from the same tradition he was clearly trying to move past.
Esposito, then, arguably goes further still than the label “post-Orientalist” permits—refusing not just Orientalism’s prejudice against Islam, but also the Western, secular-liberal framework the category itself remains tied to—far enough, I would argue, to warrant calling him a “post-post-Orientalist.” I refrain, nonetheless, from adopting that term in any settled sense, since what comes next tells a rather different story.
The case for Esposito as a neo-Orientalist
A much smaller body of scholarship, however, complicates this picture. Mohammad Samiei (2009), in his doctoral thesis, evaluates Bernard Lewis, John Esposito, and Gilles Kepel within the broader framework of what he terms “neo-Orientalism”. Within this framework, he finds Esposito the least dualistic of the three—yet still, in occasional but telling moments, prone to the very West-versus-Islam framing he otherwise avoids. Samiei’s key piece of evidence is Esposito’s own remark that support for Muslim self-determination should hold “to the extent that it does not directly threaten US interests” (Samiei 2009, 134). Even so, Samiei’s overall judgment stays generous: Esposito, he concludes, “deserves to be mentioned as a good example for solidarity with Muslims” (Samiei 2009, 134), treating the dualism as an exception rather than the rule. To my knowledge, no other published scholarship presses the neo-Orientalist charge against Esposito more directly than Samiei does—and even so, he does not go so far as to draw that conclusion himself. What follows builds on his evidence, but tests it against a different and, as I argue, more consequential register.
That register is the uncritical adoption of the modern nation-state as the framework for evaluating Muslim political life. Across several decades, Esposito served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department as well as to a number of European and Asian governments—the same cluster of state actors whose foreign policy he elsewhere criticised for pursuing imperial ambitions in the Middle East. That fact alone need not disqualify him; consulting for these institutions could just as easily be read as an attempt to influence policy from the inside. But his own willingness to cap Muslim self-determination at whatever US interests would tolerate suggests the relationship ran both ways—his scholarly judgment was shaped by this proximity to power even as he tried to shape policy through it.
His inclination for preserving the status quo of the modern state system runs deeper than his institutional consultancies—it structures his very criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of Islamist movements the world over. Esposito’s sympathy, it appears, is reserved for Islamist movements operating within the confines of the existing nation-state boundaries—contesting elections, sitting in parliaments, and accepting national sovereignty. In The Future of Islam, for example, he favourably catalogues Turkey, Iraq, Bangladesh, Senegal, Nigeria, Mali, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan as states with democratically elected governments, alongside Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, where elections have at least been introduced (Esposito 2010, 145). The measuring principle never changes across these cases: what matters is their participation within the existing national structures, never conceptualised through any political horizon beyond them. In fact, he states this premise outright in one of his earlier works: the “borders of independent ‘nation-states’”, he writes, “are remarkably significant in defining the identity, leadership, and field of activities of new Islamic movements, even when a movement spreads beyond national boundaries” (Esposito and Voll 1996, 7).
Even movements with genuinely transnational roots, such as Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood, are judged legitimate precisely on the assumption that they now function largely within national boundaries. Esposito credits Jamaat-i-Islami’s founder with reconceiving Islamic governance as a modern, consultative “theo-democracy” grounded in Pakistan’s own institutions, and traces the Muslim Brotherhood’s legitimacy to its distinct national branches—Egyptian, Sudanese, Syrian—each contesting elections within its own parliament, rather than to any unified transnational movement (Esposito and Voll 1996, 8). His harshest criticism, correspondingly, falls on movements that reject that framework altogether: he singles out al-Qaeda as especially dangerous, and rightly so, not for its violence alone but because it is “transnational in its identity and recruitment and global in its ideology, strategy, targets, and network of organizations” (Esposito 2016). The dividing line he draws, in other words, is not simply violence versus non-violence; it is whether a movement accepts the existing framework of the nation-state as the legitimate container of politics, or not.
This is consistent with his treatment of colonialism itself: he goes beyond classical Orientalists like Lewis and Huntington in acknowledging colonial and imperial legacy as a continuing cause of the Muslim world’s present predicaments, describing many Muslim-majority governments as shaped by “a legacy of European colonial rule” (Esposito 2010, 63). Yet that acknowledgement stops precisely at the governments Western intervention produced, never reaching the state form it left behind. For example, in Pakistan, he explains the country’s overreliance on Western models of development as an inheritance of British rule; similarly, in Malaysia, he traces the sharp separation made between religion and state to British colonial administration (Esposito and Voll 1996, 104, 125). In each case, colonialism only accounts for the content of governance—its laws, its institutions, its constitutional architecture—but the nation-state itself is never interrogated as colonialism’s own creation; its sovereignty and its borders are simply assumed, not explained.
This is not incidental: the “paradigmatic Islamic governance”, according to Hallaq’s (2013) account, existed not as an end in itself but as a means to nurture the Muslim ummah’s (community) divinely mandated moral commitment—political rule and law bound together by God’s sovereignty, not the state’s. The modern state, by contrast, is accountable only to itself, making any conception of a “modern Islamic state” in the conventional sense not just impossible, but a conceptual oxymoron. That is, the modern state form exists on a foundational premise that excludes the very religious goals Islamic governance was meant to realise. Esposito’s criterion for judging the legitimacy of Islamist movements—requiring them to operate democratically within the constraints of the nation-state framework—prematurely closes off any alternative, transnational conception of Muslim political life. This, I argue, ends up reinforcing the same Orientalist logic Hallaq elsewhere identifies at the heart of the modernity project (Hallaq 2018, 4).
What this allows us to see, then, is not simply that Esposito’s criterion with regard to the modern state is narrow, but that its narrowness is structurally continuous with the very Orientalist logic he is otherwise credited with dismantling. It is this continuity, I contend, that the label neo-Orientalist is meant to capture.
Beyond either label?
Calling a scholar a “post-Orientalist” amounts to claiming that their scholarship has completely transcended any traces of Orientalism. As demonstrated above, that assertion fails to stand up to critical scrutiny in Esposito’s case. On the fronts of liberalism, secularism, and anthropocentric humanism, Esposito genuinely surpasses Said—not by out-reasoning him within a shared secular-liberal framework, but by rejecting that framework altogether. He succeeds in this by interpreting Islam not as a belief system waiting to secularise to be deemed legitimate according to Enlightenment standards—but as a self-sufficient, complete worldview in itself rooted in tawhid, an approach he owed to his mentor, Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi.
However, on the question of the modern state, Esposito falls short, and ends up at exactly the position Said never left. His criterion for evaluating the legitimacy of political Islam never interrogates whether the nation-state itself—the very structure within which he locates the authoritarian governments that Western colonialism produced—was also colonialism’s own structural residue. Nor does he entertain, even tentatively, the possibility that the nation-state paradigm might simply be the wrong container for evaluating Islamic political life altogether. This mismatch is not an accident. Rather, in Hallaq’s own terms, it reconstitutes the Orient in the image of the West rather than confronting it on its own terms (Hallaq 2018, 12). The term “neo-Orientalist”, in this regard, could possibly be a more precise characterisation.
In the final evaluation, no single label represents what this analysis actually indicates about Esposito: a scholar who came close to overcoming Orientalism on one front, but who remained silent on the other. He interrogated Orientalism’s stereotypes about Islam, but not the modern state system those stereotypes ultimately served. Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Esposito is not to force him into either category, but to extend the tradition of scholarly self-scrutiny he began—further than he himself was ever willing to take it. That, in the end, is what this obituary owes him—not a final verdict, but an unfinished question, carried a little further than what he left us with.
References
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Venkkat G Krishnan is a Senior Research Fellow (SRF) at the Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. His research interests lie at the intersection of religion and International Relations theory, focusing on its ontological and epistemological contours.