Surveillance systems existed for millennia but only European biopower made them distinctive.

Evidence

Safi’s simplistic understanding of surveillance in the Foucauldian sense leaves out the more important components of biopower that were characteristic of Europe. European surveillance came not only with the rise of the modern state as a new political phenomenon but also with a system of incarceration, policing, bureaucracy, health, and education, none of which had an analogue in Islam. Furthermore, nothing in Safi’s narrative speaks to biopower. What emerges is a top-down narrative of a “watchful eye.” Here no regimes of truth or discursive formations are to be found. What is generally unprecedented about Foucault’s ideas is that power wielded by people or groups by way of episodic or sovereign acts of domination or coercion is not a useful analytical category. Power is dispersed and pervasive; it is everywhere. In Foucault’s conception, there is no king whose head may be cut off. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 685

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what makes Foucault’s surveillance concept novel: dispersed power with no sovereign at its head, as opposed to mere espionage.
• XREF: Connects to the broader debate about applying European critical theory frameworks to premodern Islamic societies.