On Muslim Decoloniality

Problems with the "decolonization" culture

May 08, 2023

Viceregal Lodge in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India, formerly the residence of the British Viceroy of India. Photo by Romeio Paul on Unsplash

Introduction

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.[...] We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy. - Edward Said (2003)

J Daniel Elam defines postcolonial theory as a “body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century.” As an academic discipline, postcolonial studies emerged in the second half of the twentieth century focusing on the many impacts of colonialism on the colonized world. Within that context, a number of works were, and continue to be, authored and debated related to the Muslim world. These works, and the discipline at large, are essential for Muslims to understand, as the reality of imperialism continues to animate the world in profound ways (albeit in different forms than before), while the history of colonization increasingly becomes an afterthought in official quarters devoted to whitewashing past atrocities.

In recent years, this imperative to understand the impact of colonialism has been thrown into sharp relief with the rise of a larger “decolonization” culture that has expanded well outside of the previously narrow field of postcolonial studies. Within this culture, a growing number of Muslim thinkers, both academics and non-academics, have come to anchor a great deal of their thought in artifacts of postcolonial theory. They marshal resources from the discipline and seek to apply them to challenges Muslims currently face. Although this type of reflectionary work is important, it can pose problems when done carelessly or without greater consideration for factors not readily considered by postcolonial theorists. An even greater complication arises when postcolonial thought is instrumentalized in tandem with related intellectual disciplines that principally peddle deconstruction, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, scientific relativism, and more.

Accordingly, this piece endeavors to offer but a brief glimpse into (at least some) postcolonial thought, and from there critique and review the recent spate of “decolonization” efforts underway. Along the way, I intend to pay special attention to those within the postcolonial space that use their scholarly discursive to undermine the Islamic tradition, offering structural critiques that subordinate normative jurisprudence and the explicit dictates of revelation in the name of an allegedly “antiwestern” postcoloniality.

A Brief Overview

Given what Wael Hallaq has described (ruefully, for Hallaq) as the “canonical” nature of his intellectual output, it is perhaps prudent to begin this section with a postcolonial scholar whose thought continues to command immense respect and reverence in spaces devoted to postcolonial studies and Islam, Edward Said. Said’s seminal work Orientalism, published in 1978, described what Said termed “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.”” This style of thought – orientalism, that is — carried meaningful implications, not only politically, but intellectually and culturally as it produced the discursive context within which the East was little more than a plaything of the Western gaze, incapable of defining itself except as a countervailing “other,” reduced to the spectacle of the Orientalist imagination. In short, orientalism was an instrument of (and, importantly, vehicle for) western hegemony operating under the pretense of scholarly intrigue.

Critics of Orientalism number in the hundreds, and range from those mostly sympathetic to Said’s contentions to those who reject them out of hand and suspect him of ulterior motives (e.g. Bernard Lewis). Much attention along the way has been paid to Said’s historical accuracy, or lack thereof, while others have critiqued the way Said has appropriated or allegedly misunderstood the thinking and discourses of thinkers he appeals to (i.e., Foucault). A useful summary of these critiques and others can be found in Macfie’s introduction to Orientalism: A Reader.

One of the more astute critiques of Orientalism has come from Wael Hallaq in his work Restating Orientalism. Hallaq argues, inter alia, that Said’s treatment of orientalism suffers from its treatment of Islam insofar as it defines Islam by way of what Hallaq terms “difference.” That is, that Said, whose thought on this matter is indebted to Massignon, regards the difference between Islam and the Modern West as a clash between modernity and ancient tradition. On this note Hallaq observes:

These pairs, by the fact of their appearance in any text, seem to cause Said an extreme case of anxiety. The categories of “religion,” “tradition,” “mysticism,” and “ancient” are not amenable to analytical study, nor can they be even considered as serious objects of research. As critic W. J. T. Mitchell has poignantly remarked, Said characterizes religion “in terms of fairly reductive stereotypes,” as “dogmatic, fanatical, irrational, intolerant, and obsessed with mystery, obfuscation, and human helplessness in the presence of the inscrutable divine (or demonic) design.” Said comes even uncomfortably close to mocking Massignon’s own deep appreciation of mysticism, describing the mystical path as possessing a tendency toward the “nonrational and even inexplicable” (268). Nor has Said cultivated any scholarly appreciation of the concept of “tradition” or an understanding of the implications of “ancient” in Massignon’s work, which has a resounding similarity to that adopted by Guénon. For Said himself, the “ancient” was a strikingly oppositional category for the modern, that which is irrelevant, obsolete, defunct, not a continuous quality that has, through centuries and millennia, maintained a human and insentient ecology tested by time.

Hallaq goes on to juxtapose the relative treatments of tradition by Said and the late French traditionalist René Guénon thusly:

Guénon views the entire world of modern academia, including its humanities and natural sciences, as integral to Europe’s discursive formations, all contributing, more or less, to the production of a particular view of the world, and all, at the same time, standing for him as the product of the “civilizational” soil in which they found themselves. Orientalism is just one of the many disciplines that reflected the “West’s” attitudes, but one that happened to be geared toward the study of the “East.” [...] Said, on the other hand, isolates Orientalism in general and “Islamic Orientalism” in particular for a special treatment, assigning to them a second-rate intellectual competence and a problematic way of seeing the Orient, having lagged behind in comparison with general academia and, especially, with the “human sciences” (260–61). Unlike Guénon, Said does not extend his critical acumen to anything beyond Orientalism, sheltering the “human sciences” from foundational critique, along with the surrounding environment, all the while constantly alluding to, but never showing the structure of, the ties between Orientalism and the “considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture” enveloping it (12). Nor did he even think that Orientalism may have the potential, in a better world, to come to the aid of the very culture that produced it, trying to reconstruct a concept of history that could at least shed light on modernity’s sweeping crises.

What is relevant for my purpose here is to merely note that Said’s project was not a defense of Islam (even as it aptly critiqued much by way of orientalist distortion of Islam), nor was it anchored in any serious understanding of the Islamic tradition (or any religious tradition, for that matter). Moreover, insofar as Said thought about the question of tradition, he viewed it as atavistic or otherwise irrational. Muslims of the orient as a community were essential to his thinking, and there is a great deal one can admire and certainly much that later scholars owe to his thinking in this regard. Nevertheless, the framework is one that has to be engaged with carefully, certainly when transposed onto contemporary issues facing Muslims as a theologically committed community and not merely an undifferentiated, racialized “other” – a topic to which we will return shortly.

Before moving on from Said, there is another feature of his thinking that has become a staple of much postcolonial scholarship after him, and that is his engagement and use of postmodern discourses. As Fred Dallmayre notes in his “The Politics of Nonidentity,” postmodernism militates against the “modern infatuation with certainty and self-identity” by “opening windows onto alterity, difference, and nonidentity – a profound destabilization of cognitive boundaries and frameworks.” Dallmayre goes on to situate Said’s postmodernism within that context, including Said’s intellectual debt to the thought of Adorno, Foucault, and Deleuze, figures Said himself frequently referred to in his writings.

Postmodernism, like its handmaidens poststructuralism, scientific relativism, and critical theory, can be an effective tool for deconstructing unchallenged orthodoxies. It can expose prejudices and reveal important power dynamics, ones that condition ideas and beliefs that give rise to western chauvinism. But it can occasionally do so at great expense, often leaving us with little room to produce constructive and affirmative commitments. And insofar as any are asserted, they repeatedly risk critique as either recapitulating power or paradoxically responding to it. Take for instance Salman Sayyid’s work A Fundamental Fear where he contends with the question of truth:

The truth is one way of describing statements which we consider to be good and useful. In such a pragmatist definition, truth is constructed and not given. Politics, then, is the process by which societies arrive at a new vision of the truth, a new way of describing the good or the useful. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, “[t]he political question…is truth itself.”

Later in the work, Sayyid exposits a defense of postmodernism when understood as a “decentring of the West,” and juxtaposes this postmodernism-as-decentering with Akbar Ahmed’s denunciation of postmodernism in Ahmed’s own work on the matter which argues postmodernism as an ideology fundamentally anathema to Islam. For Ahmed, Islam is incapable of engaging in postmodern projects (such that it remains the “paradigmatic other”) and cannot survive within a framework bereft of modernity’s certainties. Sayyid rejects this reading as reducing Islam to the foundational myths of modernity, or at least treating it as inherently dependent upon them.

Islam is therefore both central to postcolonial scholars who focus on the orient and also at the periphery of its intellectual engagements. It is at once the subject of the scholar's concern but rarely the object of his study – certainly not in a manner that would be recognizable to any traditionally trained Muslim scholar. Most crucially, Islam as a subject within postcolonial scholarship is often hampered by the dichotomous world of “the West” and “the Rest,” to which it is incapable of escaping except through self-conscious abandonment by the scholar, which is to say it must reside outside of the vortex altogether rather than engage either/or thoughtfully on its own terms.

A Problem of Agency and Moral Inadequacy

An altogether different, though nevertheless important problem is encountered when we explore questions of agency and how postcolonial scholarship often undermines individual and communal agency by allowing colonial history to overdetermine its view of history and how it relates that history to the current day. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s recent work Against Decolonization avers this as one of the greatest problems with scholarly treatments of colonialism and pushes to “decolonize” various vocations and institutions. On this, Táíwò writes:

I have argued [...] that putting colonisation at the centre of ex-colonised lives is historically suspect and has the unintended consequence of making less legible, if not rendering completely invisible, the autonomous lives (despite colonisation) led by the colonised even while colonialism lasted. It eviscerates the lives they led before colonialism was imposed on them, and the lives they have crafted since they threw off the colonial yoke. Opposing this does not mean a denial of the impact of colonialism on the life, times and thoughts of the colonised. But it surely means, and I cannot emphasise this enough, refusing to define the colonised strictly by the colonial experience, however profound colonialism’s impact may have been on them. Hence, I insist that the ultimate problem with decolonisation discourse is its oft-unapprehended failure to take seriously the complexity of African agency and the many ways it has grappled with both colonialism and its legacy – ranging from wholesale embrace of colonially derived languages, ideas, institutions, processes and practices to attempts at wholesale rejection of the same. We need to engage with this complexity.

For too many immersed in decolonial discourses, the very idea of transcending colonization appears little more than fantasy – or, perhaps worse, an idea inextricably linked to maintaining western hegemony and power. In this reading, there is no idea, thought, or institution in the orient (or occident concerning the orient) except that it has been fully altered by the entanglements of colonization. This presumed thoroughgoing overhaul leaves us to approach the orient as not only incapable, but as a set of societies whose ideas and reality can only be assessed by employing a hermeneutic of obfuscation: even if it appears to transgress or subvert western norms, it is nevertheless colonially influenced, responding to white domination and power, and reducible to some form of reaction or imitation.

Moreover, much decolonization discourse that emerges from this can be deontologically thin. In telling us a certain view or idea has been impacted by colonialism, it tells us nothing as to whether the idea is wrong, bad, inadequate, counterproductive, or false. Nor does it tell us why that relationship matters, how the relationship has produced something nefarious or otherwise harmful, or whether that relationship has evolved in any meaningful way. It elides all of those questions, treating the mere identification of a presumed colonial relationship as sufficient to delegitimize or cast under suspicion ideas and institutions tout court.

In lieu of admitting a clear conception of a goodly life (or even an elementary theory of ethics), decolonial discourses often operate with an assumed moral horizon that is fundamentally rooted in colonialism being the ultimate evil from which any and all efforts to undermine and subvert it gain moral standing. This conveniently fetishizes the work of the postcolonial scholar, making him the hero of his own story, while unnecessarily scandalizing institutions and ideas that may in fact be beneficial, productive, or meritorious in their own right, even if they have superficial or significant relationships to coloniality.

Penchant for Deconstruction

Postcolonial scholars engaging with challenges facing Muslims can often find themselves combating the ongoing problem of essentialisms. In this, they rebut the manner in which Islam and Muslims are “essentialized” monolithically, portrayed through one dimensional caricatures that retrench harmful stereotypes which frequently contribute to Muslim domination. And these rebuttals most often involve some form of deconstruction – for instance, how “religion” is being invoked, or “Islam” understood, or even how Muslim men or women are being typecast. However necessary this work, popular decolonization discourse can often take this effort a step further and weaponize deconstruction to dismiss ideas and opinions advocates merely don’t like. In writing about this problem of deconstruction previously (specifically in relation to my work refuting Scott Kugle’s writings on homosexuality) I observed the following about those advocating for sanctioning homosexual conduct in Islam:

…according to this group, Islam – as a concept – is not amenable to any objective definition and thus cannot sustain a “unanimous consensus.” This critique is often nested within a larger ideological paradigm which asserts that religion contains little to no meaningful content in and of itself independent of what religious adherents themselves project onto it. According to this view, religion must remain the preserve of the open market, and it is only through a constant exchange of ideas that can be tethered to, or expressed in, religious terms that a religious meaning can be generated – itself only a singular meaning among a seemingly endless possibility of meanings. Religion is thus viewed as an empty vessel, expressed with a vocabulary that has historically acquired meaning through a process of appropriation by a specific set of powerful social actors. These actors were said to have entrenched prevailing cultural norms indigenous to their time and place as expressions of faith to the exclusion of other possibilities and, in so doing, advancing their subjective wants and desires under the mantle of religious authority. Because there is no such thing as an objective and (in principle) unified Islam under this deconstructionist hermeneutic, but instead only “islams” (each refracting cultural, political, and social subjectivities in the name of God and faith), maintaining an “Islam” with a singular definition of any practice or belief is to do little more than engage in interpretive domineering. Such domineering is said to hegemonically disempower minoritarian views and subordinate the intellectual contributions of the disenfranchised to the authority of an allegedly “patriarchal,” “heteronormative,” and denominationally “chauvinistic” understanding of the faith.
This sort of deconstructionism has emerged in the past decade as an increasingly favored method of problematizing normative religious doctrine (at least within academic Islamic Studies, religious studies, and other secular social science fields in the Western academy). Its appeal lies in its democratization of interpretive authority. Figures and groups previously relegated to the margins are now offered not only a voice, but one on seemingly equal ground with not only contemporaries, but with predecessors whose positions have carried and continue to carry immense intellectual weight. Its weakness, however, lies in its entailments. A true global and indiscriminate hermeneutic of deconstruction cannot be sustained without leading to complete nihilism. If all “islams” stand on equal interpretive ground, then no interpretation can be claimed as better or worse than any other. Indeed, any claim of superior scholarship, accuracy of meaning, or faithfulness to authorial intent would be dismissed as mere declarations of power, not truth. Of what use is such an “Islam” at all? And on what basis would the label of Islam or Muslim hold any meaning?

Too often, decolonial discourse employs deconstruction for the purpose of problematizing religious norms. In fact, it often does so precisely to militate against normativity itself. In this, one cannot speak of Islam, the Quran, Sunnah, haram, or halal because doing so will be met with banal decolonizing critiques: that in employing normative language, one is allegedly employing Western epistemes, or that there is hidden in the language employed a specifically Western ontology, or that the very concepts and categories were “invented,” whole cloth, by the West and as such cannot be used to reliably and faithfully represent anything in Islam, and so on. Often, the very accusation itself stands in as self-substantiating: there is no greater effort to explain how in fact the terms and categories are guilty of the allegedly Western dependencies – it is, quite literally, all just hand-waving. And on the rare occasion some substantiation is provided, decolonialists frequently fail to provide any counter or alternative that engages with revelation and the Islamic tradition to formulate a plausible position, presuming of course that such a position is even of interest.

Liberalism in Another Garb

For all of the criticisms of western modernity, including incisive critiques of secularism and secularity, capitalism, and colonial hegemony, often the decolonial conclusion can all-too-conveniently overlap with the latest western liberal fashions. This can be seen in the way patriarchy is invoked to denounce a robust notion of gender or even the manner in which “choice” and “consent” as metaphysical constructs are employed to judge Muslims in their relationship to Islam. Take for instance a recent piece entitled “To Wear or Not to Wear the Hijab” by postcolonial scholar Shvetal Vyas Pare. Pare admirably defends and supports Muslim women in India fighting to wear their hijab in public spaces and challenges the notion that hijab can never be donned faithfully absent coercion. However, the article goes from there to assert a greater metaphysical commitment to women’s choice itself, framing the entire question of hijab and coercion as one of power, not religion, and likening it to many other locations of power imposition:

Families police their female members over what they wear, what time they go out and return, who they marry, whether they are straight or gay, whether they should have male friends or not, if they are trans and so on. The oppression of women and children by their family members and relatives occurs worldwide across classes: what religion does is provide the language it is done in, but the fact of oppression is about power.

It is for this reason, for Pare, that a postcolonial advocate can support hijab in India, support efforts of women fighting against hijab in Iran, and promote hijab as a form of resistance in societies that employ western feminist or other colonial narratives to justify “saving” Muslim women from their supposed oppression. At the end of the day, support is predicated on context and recognizing where colonization is working against women as well as where choice is being fully actualized.

However, the sanctity of choice is never absolute. Just as people possess the power to make choices, we regularly encourage people to make the right choices. And wearing hijab is the “right” choice, not because it fulfills the male desire to police female clothing, but because it fulfills a religious obligation and accords with the divine command. Families instructing and raising their daughters to wear hijab, to obey and adhere to the sexual ethics of Islam, to refrain from contravening Islam’s gender norms (inclusive of avoiding solitude with a marriageable member of the opposite sex, i.e., khalwa), and more are not acting in the interest of “power,” but instead a life comported to Allah and His pleasure.

As with “power,” so too with “patriarchy,” “colonization,” or even “Eurocentrism.” These are categories and concepts that apply importantly to many domains of life. When used carefully, they illuminate what lies beneath the surface or has otherwise been concealed. When deployed indiscriminately, however, they obscure realities, become instruments for subversive agendas, and promote little more than the latest far-left verities.

Conclusion

To be clear, this brief review is not intended to dismiss the entire body of postcolonial scholarship or otherwise cast it under suspicion. Quite the contrary, in fact. As I have gone to some pains to qualify and make clear, it is important to engage with and appreciate postcolonial scholarship and studies, particularly as it exposes Eurocentrism and the many ways in which western imperialism continues to color Muslim thinking and Muslim societies.

Nevertheless, what this review does assert, however, is that this body of intellectual output needs to be engaged with carefully, recognizing that it is not inherently ordered around maintaining the Islamic tradition, that at least some of its thought runs contrary to core Islamic precepts, and that the specifically “decolonization” discourse that has emerged from it and been popularized in leftist spaces is in fact something to treat with a great deal of suspicion and concern. When liberal urbanites begin parroting chic jargon about “decolonizing” spaces, quite often they mean little more than refactoring those spaces to meet their social expectations. In this, they revel in destabilizing orthodoxies, countering any claim of normativity with lazy appeals to pluralism, multiplicity, complexity, and context, and deriding Muslims asserting traditional norms as having been unduly influenced by Christian or Western thinking and values. The frameworks and theories they reproduce frequently undermine the very idea of human agency and personal responsibility, limiting human possibilities under the weight of colonial structures. Their lack of any clear normative moral commitments results in a simplistic dualism: all that is alleged as colonial is self-evidently bad, and all that resists it is self-evidently good.

The Messenger of Allah is reported to have said, “The word of wisdom is the lost property of the believer. Wherever he finds it, he is most deserving of it.” As Muslims, we should be capable of benefiting from useful and well thought out scholarship while employing discernment. It is precisely that discernment that this essay urges, while expressing much greater reservations and concerns with the populist strain of “decolonization” discourse, one that is gaining a following in Muslim spaces.

We ask Allah to show us the truth as truth and give us the ability to follow it and show us falsehood as falsehood and give us the ability to avoid it. Ameen.

Added notes:

The New York Times runs an important piece entitled “‘The Godfather of AI’ Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead.” Quote from it:
Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
He does not say that anymore.
LM Sacasas offers a characteristically perceptive view on the way modern technologies serve to “outsource virtue”:
The force that propels this dialectic is the desire to operate at ever greater scales, whether of quantity, space, time or speed. There are thresholds that, when crossed, demand ever more sophisticated codes of behavior or systems that eliminate human judgment and involvement. Under these conditions, networks of consumption arise that render people increasingly passive and dependent, while foreclosing opportunities for action, community and engagement with the world. In these networks, human activity will increasingly be judged in terms of risk management. From this perspective, technology appears chiefly as a force aimed at rendering humans obsolete.
Shaykh Yasir Qadhi provides a brave khutbah on confronting transgender ideology - give it a listen. I pray Allah rewards him for it and that it serves to encourage Muslims to take up this responsibility and that more imams follow suit.
NBA predictions: I think the Suns will down the Nuggets, that the Lakers will beat the Warriors, the Sixers over the Celtics, and Knicks over the Heat. Suns-Sixers in the finals.