Empire, Islam and the Postcolonial (original) (raw)
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Postcolonialism and Islam:Theory, Literature, Culture, Society
Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society, Routledge, 2014
Postcolonialism and Islam are two terms that frequently appear in tandem. However,the relationship between the two and the question of their compatibility has not beenextensively investigated. The speed and intensity of the changes characteristic of latemodernity under the pressures of cultural and economic globalisation has traumatisedMuslims and non-Muslims alike. Hybrid identity formations, very often provisional,are generated in the articulations of difference marked by newly and re-imaginedrelations to faith, nation, class, gender, sexuality and language. At the same time, olddiscourses such as Orientalism are re-vamped and applied to the new configurations.Postcolonialism might seem to provide a framework for approaching the experiencesof not only formerly colonized subjects, but émigrés, exiles and expatriates and their host societies. However, intellectuals and writers, both non-Muslim and Muslim, havestruggled with postcolonial theory as an effective tool for analysing and accountingfor the experience of Muslims in the modern world. The purpose of this collection of essays is therefore to re-visit, probe and expand the applicability of these categoriesfrom a multi-sited and cross-disciplinary perspective, including the historicalexperience of Muslim migration to Britain, the discursive representation of Islam inthe West, and the theoretical critique of such discursive practices – including that of Postcolonialism itself - specifically in the areas of theory, literary, cultural, and filmstudies
Introduction: Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus
As a collective effort, this book offers an alternative approach for analyzing the lived social, political, and cultural experiences of people from Islamicate contexts in relation to historically constructed (and presently sustained) asymmetrical global power structures, and beyond the false binaries of Islam/modernity, and Islam/West. To this end, the contributions in this volume examine, from a wide range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, the historical encounters with, past and present responses to, and ongoing efforts to unsettle and transcend what we identify as colonial modernity, within Islamicate contexts. The analytical starting point of this approach is an understanding of colonial modernity as a condition whose introduction into Islamicate contexts was facilitated historically by the gradual expansion of European colonialism into South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Northern African societies. Also informing our approach is the recognition of the many modes through which, in Europe itself, and in North America by extension, people from Islamicate contexts have been, and continue to be, otherized in the constitution and the advancement of the project of modernity.
Postcolonial nationalist elites maintained the structures of power they had inherited from the colonial experience, and as a rule after gaining so-called independence for their countries, they often aggressively pursued the very same colonial policies they had fiercely fought against during the colonial period. They inherited from Europe a readymade nation-state (with its constitutive power structures) for which the existing social formations had not been adequately prepared. The political, legal, and cultural struggles of today's Muslims stem from dissonance between their moral and cultural aspirations, on the one hand, and the moral realities of a modern world, on the other – realities with which they must live, but were not of their own making.
Syllabus - Empires, Imperialism and Islam (Spring 2018)
This seminar will survey interactions between empires and Islam from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It will consider the varied responses of Islamic polities to the expansion of European empires, their role in proliferating networks of travel and communication, as well as the place of religion in anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements. Geographically, we will cover Asia very broadly defined: from the Ottoman Empire in the west, through the Middle East, Central and South Asia, to Indonesia and Japan to the east. Individual classes will focus, for instance, on imperial connections, the emergence of pan-Islamism, sufi networks, oceanic travel, subaltern social and political movements, and Cold War era Muslim ideologues. The course will conclude with a look at the rise of more militant Islamic ideologies in recent years. Investigating this two-century long history will help us understand the complex role that Islam has played in the making of the modern world. Course readings will be on the whole recent scholarship on these subjects, with key primary texts introduced in class.
Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2012
During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.
Journal of the Faculty of Social and Management Sciences. Social and Administrative Science Review Umaru Musa Yar'adua University, 2017
Scholarly opinions on the question of Sunni Muslim response to the colonial contact is diverse and contested. This writing has contributed in different ways, by presenting a brief analysis of contact, and some major political ideas of Muslim scholars in the 19th and 20th century, particularly, those advocated by Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis among others. The analysis is based on the Haddad historical point of view, It is a framework which classified the scholars based on their response and reactions to the political domination of West in a Muslim land, and not a theory. The literature reflects various ideas of the acculturationists, normativitists, and neonormativists. The methodology of the paper is largely interpretive as it used documentary sources.
Parameters of a Postcolonial Sociology of the Ottoman Empire
Political Power and Social Theory, 2013
The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such
The academic theme of Islam and colonialism is controversial, vast and inexhaustive. With colonialism almost all over the Muslim world from the mid 19 th Century and the diverse impacts and implications it has on the colonized countries, it is understandable if views differ and diverge. In Africa, Central and Southeast Asia as in most neocolonial countries of the world, colonial legacies still replete as they endured to the contemporary times. The study of Islam and colonialism in Northern Nigeria is expectedly so partly because of the nature and substance of the British rule between 1897, when Ilorin emirate was conquered and 1960, when the then colonially formed Nigeria got her independence. Northern Nigeria is diverse though dynamic and colorful in terms of its people, culture and socio-material setting. As such, Muhammad S. Umar's narrowing the research to the intellectual responses of the Northern Nigeria Muslims to British colonial rule is a brilliant decision. This is not to say that such a task is a simple one. The outcome of this research engagement is largely a success.