Is Islamic Decoloniality Possible?

The limits of post/anti-colonialism as a lens for a Muslim thinker

Decoloniality and Muslims

As an academic in training, one of the best parts of Substack is that it affords me a place to think through ideas, sift through and arrange readings, and create narratives in a low stakes environment. Simply put, it let’s me “write through” ideas in ways that will then inform future reading, thinking, and writing. One such avenue of late is my continued disillusionment and dissatisfaction with postcolonialism and decoloniality as a lens.

Decoloniality is often caricatured in conservative circles – both Muslim and non – for entirely separate reasons. For non-Muslims, decoloniality threatens the basic narrative of Western exceptionalism. In this narrative, the world was an endarkened wasteland of corruption and oppression until the yoke of the Catholic church was overthrown by the bold thinkers of the Renaissance who risked life and limb to bring enlightenment to the European world. These courageous new thinkers established the scientific method, decentered God from the universe, and overthrew the feudal order to birth modernity.

Fueled by these advances in methodology and technology, the Western world overpowered and civilized the rest of it, until the European powers cannibalized each other with two World Wars. Then, the torch bearer of everything right and good about Western civilization, America, inherited the twin goal of protecting and civilizing the world.

To the Muslim, decoloniality’s emphasis on intersectional liberation – that is, theorizing inequality as a result of domination, which is the central evil of decolonial theory – threatens hierarchies that conservative Muslims are quite invested in, particularly in the questions of the role of women and LGBTQ people in society. Additionally, the purely material objectives – and often methods – of decoloniality are in direct opposition to a religious tradition that emphasizes the next world over this one.

To each, decoloniality – by either emphasizing the colonial nature of the West’s rise to power, or by emphasizing intersectional material liberation – is a threat to the narratives of conservative establishments. It’s important, then, to state how I understand decoloniality so as not to vigorously spar a strawman in the field – an act that is quite often engaged in by conservative Muslims, who erect a series of strawmen, defeat them with all the flourishing force of powerful rhetoric, and claim victory over the caricatures of their opponents.

Colonialism, to me, is at its core a relationship of extraction from the weak to the strong. Coloniality is the interconnected systems that work together to create, maintain, and defend that extractive relationship. Some examples are in order to illustrate the difference:

The extraction of wealth from Colonial India to Britian was colonialism rather than a simpler, older imperialism. The system of government that ensured that laws could only be passed by those who benefited from colonialism; the education given to Indian students to convince them that the colonial regime was good; the missionaries sent to convert Indians because Christians were supposed to be more acquiescent to colonial rule; the railroads that connected major ports with agricultural lands to speed up the process of transportation for raw materials; and much, much more; were all part of a larger, mutually supportive, and integrated system of coloniality.

Perhaps an easier distinction is to say that colonialism is the end, and coloniality is the series of deeply interconnected means that come together to achieve, maintain, and defend that end.

Decoloniality is a lens, then, that can be applied to anything. How do you decolonize tea? You see the ways in which the tea industry in all its facets contributes to the colonial enterprise: who profits most from the tea trade; how do tea companies influence politics in such a way that continues that extraction; how does tea marketing create a tea culture that perpetuates extraction; how does music and art contribute to it; etc. Then, links can be created between tea and other colonial systems; then, these can be seen as microcosms to a larger colonial enterprise, and what is learned in the decolonial study of tea can be mapped onto other industries or practices etc.

You can decolonize film, tea, international trade, and, of course, religion. If you don’t understand the basic theory behind coloniality as stated above, it becomes puzzling as to why scholars and activists alike viscerally attack the ʿUlamāʾ as tools of colonial rule. What did they do to actively aid colonial rule, the question might be asked. To the decolonial thinker, however, the inability to recognize one’s role in and step out of the colonial system is itself coloniality, because you are implicitly or explicitly reinforcing it by partaking in it.

Personally, my outlook is deeply indebted to decoloniality, along with subaltern studies, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, etc. I don’t pretend to be a scholar in any of the academic movements, but even the little with which I have engaged the fields has been deeply enlightening. I have, however, always been bothered by some underlying assumptions of the field, which are as follows:

The Moral Philosophy of Decoloniality

Decoloniality rarely makes its moral philosophical assumptions clear – it has to be teased out the way the ingredients are teased out from a dish without a recipe. The question at the core of decoloniality is why domination is wrong in the first place. And, not only why is it immoral – why should I care? I wrote in a piece last week that the most dangerous question in philosophy is “so what?” What is the answer to the “so what” of decoloniality?

Simply put, even if I can show the intricate ways in which the colonial system sustains extraction, how do I answer the two most pressing moral questions: 1) why is this bad, and; 2) so what if I, as a beneficiary of the system, don’t care? Imperial extraction is older than the Romans – indeed, for the Romans, there was great pride in their ability to extract – and, yet, guilt around extraction and its harms are not as old as imperial extraction.

Does the claim that there is inherent equality of man – a claim that is patently false – suffice for a moral philosophical critique of colonial extraction? The idea that man owes to other men what he believes is owed to him does not, in fact, follow from man’s inherent equality. One can imagine a world in which a man believes he is equal to all other men, and, for that very reason, believes that he must do whatever necessary to ensure his own survival and prosperity over that of other men. The core failure of deontology is that it begins with the answer and works backwards; it fails to see that its conclusion is not the only logical possibility of its premise.

What, then, is wrong with colonialism; what, then, is wrong for the colonized subject in acting in self interest instead of selfless communal resistance?

And, even if one was the convince the native informant or the colonial ruler of the inherent immorality of the enterprise, if either simply responds with, “so what?” what does the decolonial theorist respond with?

“Then you should feel bad,” is the worst possible response. How do you even begin to respond to indifference, to acceptance of temporal comfort at the price of moral purity?

“I might be wrong, but I’m comfortable while you’re miserable,” might be a response. How does one even begin to answer that response?

Materiality as the Lens and End of Decoloniality

Much is made of the material lens in decoloniality. That is, to the decolonial theorist, all things are understood through a purely material (this worldly) lens. What is more difficult for me to incorporate into my own thought is the material end of decoloniality. In a perfectly decolonial world, all peoples enjoy equality without extractive relationships. This, to me, stands at direct odds with how Islam envisions a perfect world: one where the barriers to the belief and practice of tawḥīd are removed. What is the role of decoloniality as a tool of propagating tawḥīd, not with materiality as an end in and of itself? Much of the Quran and Sunnah make use of materiality as a means to a spiritual end. For many decolonial scholars and activists, however, Islam as a spiritual tradition is a means to a material end.

What is Islamic decoloniality, then? To me, any attempt at creating an Islamic decolonial theory would have to abandon the core question of decoloniality while maintaining some of the method. The question would evolve away from colonialism and domination and extraction as core variables and be replaced with kufr and ṭughyān: how is a project of kufr and ṭughyān created, maintained, and perpetuated by an interconnected international structure.

In some ways, the very decolonial theorists who have equality viz. materiality as an end in and of itself are part of the very structure being studied by Islamic decoloniality.

The Theology of Equality in an Inherently Unequal World

What does it mean to equalize an inherently unequal world? What is the metaphysics, the theology of inequality? If human inequality is explained through domination, and domination is the core evil, what does it mean for a world where inequality seems to be rather natural? Why would God create a world that is inherently evil, where domination seems to be baked into the fundamental functioning of the world?

There are some who give entirely unintelligible responses to this: that inequality is good, suffering from material inequality is entirely mental, and that inequality in power does not create inequality in material outcomes. And, yet, the opposite belief – that inequality should be eliminated at all costs – creates another logical conundrum for Muslims: if the sharīʿah is meant for the perpetuation of good for humans, and the sharīʿah does not eliminate inequality as any kind of end, then elimination of inequality cannot be an absolute good for humans. How can we know a good to be a greater good than any good prescribed in the Quran?

As always, the moral philosophical quickly becomes theological.

Is Domination Inevitable? The Absence of Geo-Political Realities in Decolonial Theory

The last contention is possibly the most significant material – rather than religious – challenge to decolonial theory: the role of geo-politics and not ideology for the colonial system. In many ways, I see the relationship between race and hierarchy and even extraction in a reversed way to many decolonial thinkers: the geo-political necessity came first, and the justifications came later.

The Spaniards did not conquer parts of Africa and the Americas and enslave their people because they believed they were superior. They did so because they were embroiled in an existential tussle with France and the Ottomans for control over the Europe and the Mediterranean. The path of least resistance was conquest of lands outside of Europe, extraction and processing of those resources, and using them to fuel the war machine of Europe.

Once Spain began its colonial enterprises, the British, French, and Dutch became terrified of the power and wealth Spain was extracting from its colonial holdings, and, afraid of being overpowered by a joint Hapsburg dominion that also had massive overseas holdings, began to experiment with their own colonial projects. In this story, the geo-political realities of colonialism are always primary, and the system that upholds it are secondary.

The challenge this story of colonialism poses to decoloniality as a project is that the same geo-political realities that animated colonialism still animate the world today. Colonialism is not irrational at all; it’s completely rational and extremely effective in maintaining the geo-political advantage of those states capable of it. And, unless the entire system of states (not nations, but the very concept of individual states) collapses and is replaced with a system where humans don’t compete over complete control over finite resources, humans are powerfully incentivized to maintain systems of extraction.

So, then, what even is the material end of decoloniality? To convince the world that we can all live together and happily if we can all just be friends? How is this not the justification of liberalism on steroids? How does one convince humans to not act in the most optimal way to defend their – and their children’s and children’s children’s – best interests in a world where geo-political competition is the rule, not the exception.

In fact, this goes back to the first question, the moral one: how does one answer the retort, “yes, it’s all wrong, but it’s necessary to ensure we don’t fall behind our enemies?”

A Final Note

In the end, this is not a “take down” of decoloniality or anything stupid like that. This is a series of thoughts but someone who is looking to benefit from – and learn how to incorporate the questions and findings of – the decolonial tradition into his own thinking. I could be entirely incorrect in my questions. Perhaps I’ll find answers to my questions through further engagements. Perhaps not. There’s much left to read, much left to think, much left to write. And that’s why God created Substack.