The Asianist is Muslim Thinking through Anti-Muslim Racism with the Muslim Left (original) (raw)

2022, Who is the Asianist?: The Politics of Representation in Asian studies

In the days following September 11, 2001, Edward Said penned an article in the Guardian, pointing out that the United States was far from an innocent "sleeping giant" attacked by "Muslims" and "Islam, " as it had presented itself in the wake of the strikes on New York and Washington. 1 Rather, Said argued that the United States was the primary aggressor and an imperial "superpower almost constantly at war, or in some kind of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. " 2 In reminding the public of the status of the United States as a global empire, the postcolonial scholar called attention to how the "age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam'" overwhelmingly shaped American foreign policy in West, South, and Central Asia. 3 In remarkable foresight, Said warned of a "long war"-since deemed the "Forever War" or the "Global War on Terror"-to come if the United States and its public intellectuals did not radically transform the imperial culture that "made imaginable, even natural, imperial vision(s) of the Arab-Muslim East as a space demanding intervention. " 4 In this account of rising anti-Muslim sentiment and its consequences for US empire in the wake of 9/11 just over twenty years ago, Said merely extended many of the main arguments of his text Orientalism. In it, Said offered a trenchant critique of racialized distinction Orientalists, and therefore also colonial powers, historically made between the "Orient" and the "Occident" to claim authority over