In the aftermath of any act of violence against Muslims in the West, a number of liberal commentators and “reformers” based in the West take an apologetic - or at times taunting - tone that there is something inherently “wrong” with Islam and much that is “wrong” with Muslims. This is then offered as an explanation for why Muslims are often are the perpetrators and the receivers of religion-based violence and hatred.
It doesn’t need to be pointed out that this is a liberal criticism born out of seeing questions of identity, violence, group dynamics from the lens of individual choice and liberalism - divorced from any sense of history, any stocktaking of political and economic questions and of historical determinations of the complexities of political and social arrangements in this world.
The very choice to frame it as “Why it is Muslims who are engaged in violence?”, in any case, evades the historical roots of the problem.
The modern world was produced by colonialism and its exclusionary logic of creating/dominating markets for capitalism (which was crystallized in the colonizing West). In Asia and large parts of Africa, where ever this Western colonial modernity went, it faced dying Muslim empires - from Indochina to India to Africa to the Middle-east. The modern world born out of colonialism was racist in that to provide logic and rationality for the domination of others it reduced the others in the stature of their humanity and even their very basic human essence.
Look at any definition of ‘man’ from the era of the early Enlightenment onwards and you will see that it refers to the White European Man. Philosophers of as mainstream a hue as Voltaire (vital though he is to the Enlightenment process) admitted that ‘blacks’ are humans – but that they are in another category and inferior to ‘Man’. The rest were beasts and the White Man had a burden to civilize them.
For the West, modernity was born out of conflict with people who happened to be Muslims and the justification for ruling the latter demanded that both their religion and civilization be depicted as savage.
A strain of Enlightenment produced orientalist images of the exquisite East at one level, and of the backward society in decay which needed modernizing impulses of the high Enlightenment from Europe on the other. It will be impractical to reproduce even a portion of those biases - two examples will have to suffice here.
The first one was the production of the natives of Haiti as slaves incapable of any conception of freedom. While the grounds for modernity’s first slave-led revolution were being prepared by people like Toussaint Louverture, many European minds weren’t ready to even permit into their imagination the thought that people of the colonies were capable of as humane a thing as revolt against the colonial masters.
Troulliot, in the brilliant Silencing the past, asks the very pertinent question: how you can articulate or come to terms with an event for which you lack the very basic vocabulary and imagination? The result: either total erasure or a spin on the docile slavish image and presenting the colonized or once colonized as violent beasts.
Another example would be the production of Muslims and Islam as a monolith which is inherently oppressive. And so it was that the orientalist project, which was most often a rationalizing tool for colonialism, erased all the diversity, depth and nuance of Islamic epistemological, spiritual, intellectual and cultural tradition. The logical result of this thinking was the totalizing narratives of Western nation-states which see and conflate Muslims as a monolith and then assume a patronizing tone towards all Muslims.
The European mind of ‘modernity’ was also shaped by earlier, more immediate and direct conflict with Muslim empires. Starting from Crusades and up to the very apex of colonial modernity, the Muslim was the immediate, evil ‘other’.
But the stability of the old medieval trade routes and the kind of mutual coexistence which were the prerequisites for exchange through trade were disrupted by a unique and singular-global conception of the European Man’s superiority. The globalism of colonialism and the ‘universal’ project of enslaving rest of the ‘inferior’ races and people to the modern political and civilizational institutions of Europe were born in the womb of contest with the Muslim Other.
From Muslim-majority societies, the response to this hostile modernity varied over a range - from clarion calls for social/economic reforms to a revisionist concept of resistance which sought to recreate a “glorious past” through violent rejection of any sign of social and cultural progress.
Much has been said about this, but commentators often omit an important point: that no matter how repulsive it was, nevertheless it still was a reaction to the violence of colonialism.
And so it was that Muslim responses took two broad tendencies.
First, the movements for reforms which imagined an alternative future - based not on harking back to an era passed by, but to a progressive transformation of society in line with the dictates of the material transformation of industrialism and capitalism. This thinking was even compatible with a kind of pan-Islamic revival (not to be confused with the negative connotations it has come to be identified with today). So, this line of thought acknowledged the cultural, epistemological and religious roots of solidarity amongst Muslims but it didn’t reduce the question of reform or progress to matters of theological debates. It took stock of the political and economic questions (i.e. the material circumstances) and on the basis of a shared identity and solidarity imagined a resistance to the colonial racist modernity.
For a number of Muslim thinkers responding to colonial modernity, the particular emphasis of reform was not about how to approach actual Scriptures, because holy Scripture was not conflated with the real and pragmatic world of social, political and cultural relations. Islam, like any other religion and ideological system, had its own inner theological conflicts, debates and the usual violence inspired by these. But the religion in itself was understood in terms of lived experience.
It is due to the rupture introduced by colonial modernity that the memory of that earlier existence in tradition is lost and now the question of reform is conceived as solely the project of reinterpreting the Scripture. This is the root of a lot of arguments in the West today about how to address violence by and against Muslims.
Today’s terrifying world can’t be understood without understanding the particular historical circumstances which gave birth to it. The world as we know it today wasn’t born yesterday, or even a decade or two ago. The biases which shape the intellectual thinking and political and economic systems of today have their roots in centuries-old systems of war and exploitation.
Due to our modern world’s insistence on forgetting, we are floating in a rootless existence and the circle of debate is a closed echo chamber where phobias, bigotry and complexes are repeated and regurgitated endlessly.
What we need most today is to resurrect that progressive response to colonial modernity and escape both reductionism – whether it comes from the West or from its Islamist opponents.
It doesn’t need to be pointed out that this is a liberal criticism born out of seeing questions of identity, violence, group dynamics from the lens of individual choice and liberalism - divorced from any sense of history, any stocktaking of political and economic questions and of historical determinations of the complexities of political and social arrangements in this world.
The very choice to frame it as “Why it is Muslims who are engaged in violence?”, in any case, evades the historical roots of the problem.
The modern world was produced by colonialism and its exclusionary logic of creating/dominating markets for capitalism (which was crystallized in the colonizing West). In Asia and large parts of Africa, where ever this Western colonial modernity went, it faced dying Muslim empires - from Indochina to India to Africa to the Middle-east. The modern world born out of colonialism was racist in that to provide logic and rationality for the domination of others it reduced the others in the stature of their humanity and even their very basic human essence.
Look at any definition of ‘man’ from the era of the early Enlightenment onwards and you will see that it refers to the White European Man. Philosophers of as mainstream a hue as Voltaire (vital though he is to the Enlightenment process) admitted that ‘blacks’ are humans – but that they are in another category and inferior to ‘Man’. The rest were beasts and the White Man had a burden to civilize them.
For the West, modernity was born out of conflict with people who happened to be Muslims and the justification for ruling the latter demanded that both their religion and civilization be depicted as savage.
A strain of Enlightenment produced orientalist images of the exquisite East at one level, and of the backward society in decay which needed modernizing impulses of the high Enlightenment from Europe on the other. It will be impractical to reproduce even a portion of those biases - two examples will have to suffice here.
Starting from the Crusades and up to the very apex of colonial modernity, the Muslim was the immediate, evil ‘Other’
The first one was the production of the natives of Haiti as slaves incapable of any conception of freedom. While the grounds for modernity’s first slave-led revolution were being prepared by people like Toussaint Louverture, many European minds weren’t ready to even permit into their imagination the thought that people of the colonies were capable of as humane a thing as revolt against the colonial masters.
Troulliot, in the brilliant Silencing the past, asks the very pertinent question: how you can articulate or come to terms with an event for which you lack the very basic vocabulary and imagination? The result: either total erasure or a spin on the docile slavish image and presenting the colonized or once colonized as violent beasts.
Another example would be the production of Muslims and Islam as a monolith which is inherently oppressive. And so it was that the orientalist project, which was most often a rationalizing tool for colonialism, erased all the diversity, depth and nuance of Islamic epistemological, spiritual, intellectual and cultural tradition. The logical result of this thinking was the totalizing narratives of Western nation-states which see and conflate Muslims as a monolith and then assume a patronizing tone towards all Muslims.
The European mind of ‘modernity’ was also shaped by earlier, more immediate and direct conflict with Muslim empires. Starting from Crusades and up to the very apex of colonial modernity, the Muslim was the immediate, evil ‘other’.
But the stability of the old medieval trade routes and the kind of mutual coexistence which were the prerequisites for exchange through trade were disrupted by a unique and singular-global conception of the European Man’s superiority. The globalism of colonialism and the ‘universal’ project of enslaving rest of the ‘inferior’ races and people to the modern political and civilizational institutions of Europe were born in the womb of contest with the Muslim Other.
From Muslim-majority societies, the response to this hostile modernity varied over a range - from clarion calls for social/economic reforms to a revisionist concept of resistance which sought to recreate a “glorious past” through violent rejection of any sign of social and cultural progress.
Much has been said about this, but commentators often omit an important point: that no matter how repulsive it was, nevertheless it still was a reaction to the violence of colonialism.
And so it was that Muslim responses took two broad tendencies.
First, the movements for reforms which imagined an alternative future - based not on harking back to an era passed by, but to a progressive transformation of society in line with the dictates of the material transformation of industrialism and capitalism. This thinking was even compatible with a kind of pan-Islamic revival (not to be confused with the negative connotations it has come to be identified with today). So, this line of thought acknowledged the cultural, epistemological and religious roots of solidarity amongst Muslims but it didn’t reduce the question of reform or progress to matters of theological debates. It took stock of the political and economic questions (i.e. the material circumstances) and on the basis of a shared identity and solidarity imagined a resistance to the colonial racist modernity.
For a number of Muslim thinkers responding to colonial modernity, the particular emphasis of reform was not about how to approach actual Scriptures, because holy Scripture was not conflated with the real and pragmatic world of social, political and cultural relations. Islam, like any other religion and ideological system, had its own inner theological conflicts, debates and the usual violence inspired by these. But the religion in itself was understood in terms of lived experience.
It is due to the rupture introduced by colonial modernity that the memory of that earlier existence in tradition is lost and now the question of reform is conceived as solely the project of reinterpreting the Scripture. This is the root of a lot of arguments in the West today about how to address violence by and against Muslims.
Today’s terrifying world can’t be understood without understanding the particular historical circumstances which gave birth to it. The world as we know it today wasn’t born yesterday, or even a decade or two ago. The biases which shape the intellectual thinking and political and economic systems of today have their roots in centuries-old systems of war and exploitation.
Due to our modern world’s insistence on forgetting, we are floating in a rootless existence and the circle of debate is a closed echo chamber where phobias, bigotry and complexes are repeated and regurgitated endlessly.
What we need most today is to resurrect that progressive response to colonial modernity and escape both reductionism – whether it comes from the West or from its Islamist opponents.