How can an analysis of the Muslim and Muslim question expand the space to understand the coloniality of being. From the ancient figure of the Arab and black Saracen (predating Islam), to medieval Jewish-Muslim blood-sucking vampires, big-nosed purple Ethiopian demons, the greedy Lucifer worshiping and sexually perverted the well-endowed Prophet. Muhammad (as homo totus lubricus or a sex monster), the Christ-killing Muslims, the Jewish and pagan cynocephalia (a monster with the head of a dog or jackal) and many other distorted male and female sub-humanized monstrous non-beings (Abbasi 2016a:243 ).
Revisiting People without Souls and Religion
Regarding the second claim, Maldonado-Torres' argument that the category of "no religion" is a fundamental break with the past is historically ill-founded and overlooks the dominant framework that was used to categorize Indians as ontological. inferior. First, Maldonado-Torres, following Smith, does not adequately demonstrate that the concept of 'no religion' was used paradigmatically in European post-discovery Indian ethnographies. 14 Maldonado-Torres argues that 'sect' is synonymous with 'religion', based on another writing of Columbus in which the two terms appear together in one sentence (Maldonado-Torres 2014:639).
While citing dubious and very few historical examples of the concept of "no religion," Maldonado-Torres also contradicts herself by stating this. Regarding the challenge of defining terms and concepts anachronistically, let's take for a moment the concept of "no religion" as something romantic, as Maldonado-Torres argues. If we make further comparisons with the term "religion" to see if it has synonyms, does Maldonado-Torres' concept of "no religion" hold up, being a completely new term, as something completely unrelated.
An etymological search for the meaning of the terms 'faith', 'belief', 'religion', 'sect', 'heresy' and.
Towards a Postsecular Theoanthropological Understanding of Race and Religion
As Pagden, Mastnak, and many medieval writers would likely confirm, the Indians were thoroughly woven into the web of heretics, blasphemers, infidels, and barbarians of the Old World, even if there happened to be a minority discourse of those who had 'no religion'. Towards a Postsecular Theoanthropological Understanding of Race and Religion.. 2003), but they existed across civilizations and cultures before modernity in ways similar to and different from the modern world. Just as theology and religion are not exclusive to the 'traditional' past, religion continues into the Middle Ages even as it directly informs secular 'theology' and understandings of man.
While the white male Christian God of the past appears to have been the center of the race-religious cosmos in Old World Western Christianity, the New World ultimately gives rise to Western secular man as the imago dei and phallic arch of the modern/colonial world system. In both cases, anthropology and theology are connected and contribute to the development of the ontological exclusion in similar and different ways during the rise of the West over the Rest. Secondly, Maldonado-Torres' overemphasis of the 'religious' in the pre-modern world is a secular approach to understanding the past and obscures that what was happening was not a battle of religious 'truth and lie ' was not, but a much more complex civilization. attitude that included within itself the logic of religion and race.20 The civilizational logic of Western Christianity considered itself superior to the rest of the world before modernity, like Maldonado-Torres' discussion of the desire for Christianitis to become Universitalatis above. show.
21 Contrary to Mastnak, Maldonado-Torres argues that Christianity's negative view of Muslims was a defensive response to the growth of the Muslim empire in the Latin West.
Columbus, Las Casas, and the Transfer of Islamophobia in Conquest
The figure of the Muslim in relation to Columbus and the crusading spirit of the Spanish conquistadors more broadly needs to be emphasized to fully understand how this warfare paradigm interacted with and treated the natives. Beyond material and imperialist gain, Abbas Hamdani argues that Columbus' plan to conquer the New World should be seen as a continuation of the anti-Islamic crusades of the Middle Ages. One of the main psychosocial and material motives of both Columbus and the Spanish crown was to unite western and eastern Christians to capture the casa santa of Jerusalem and defeat the Islamic caliphates in between (Hamdani 1981:323).
Portuguese motives at that time were not only goods such as gold, ivory, slaves or spices, but also largely a political-military attempt to overcome the power and threat of the Muslim civilizational "Other". The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 should also be seen as laying the foundations on the eastern front of Western Christendom for the revival of crusading efforts for Western access to India in early modern times (Hamdani. Ottoman pressure on the East and Spanish fascination with the riches of the New World rapidly intensified into the racist capitalist pursuit of gold, ivory and spices and Indian and African life and land.
The point here is to emphasize the deep-seated psychological and cosmological drive to shape the world against Islam and other "monsters", who then turned into a white supremacist, capitalist exploitation of nearly all the life and land of Latin America , Africa, and Asia in modernity, alongside the exploitation of labour, life and land within the metropolises and proletariat of Europe.
Valladolid Debates and the Muslims
In fact, it is clear that Ginés de Sepulveda's harder argument wins, as mass genocide, enslavement, and necropolitical behavior were carried out against the Native Americans of America. What is important here is that the figure of the Muslims and the anti-Muslim logic and behavior were central to forming the definition of the Indians. Mastnak further argues that the conquest of the Americas should be seen as a continuation of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and as part of Spain's "eternal crusade" against Muslims and other "infidels" (Mastnak 1994:139).
A number of scholars (Majid 2009; Arjana 2015; Rana 2011) have argued that in many ways Indians were seen as 'new Moors' by the Spanish and Portuguese. I have argued elsewhere (Abbasi 2016b), that there was a complete transfer of Islamophobic systems and practices from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World: From the intellectual debates before 1492 and up to Valladolid, to the educational and evangelization processes used for the Moriscos and Indians from transnational Catholic orders such as the Jesuits, to torture technologies, names of Indian places of worship being identified as mosques and synagogues, indigenous cities being named after cities in the Islamic world (ie, a Mayan capital identified as 'Greater Cairo' '), the names of crusader saints such as Saint James were changed from Santiago Matamoros (Santiago Mataindios) to Santiago Mataindios (Saint of the Indian Killers), in arts and theater that staged the Christian conquest of Rhodes and Jerusalem where the Indians played the role of the conquered Muslims,23 and even economic systems such as the encomienda system which was previously used for free Morisco and Muslim labor in the Iberian Peninsula before settling in the Americas (Cardinal & Mégret 2017).
Islamophobia, Black Muslims, and Africa
All this happened before Las Casas and other Europeans proposed the export of black slaves to the Americas to spare the Indians hard labor (Mastnak 1994: 127). Islamophobia was in many ways one of the main and primary motivations in the age of European discovery and expansion25 in Africa and its. For a more detailed understanding of the various dynamics involved in an analysis of anti-blackness in the pre-modern and modern Muslim world, see Abbasi (2020).
25 Stuart Hall argues that there are two main events that caused Europe to break away from its continental shell and expand: The first was the early Portuguese explorations of the African coast and the second was Columbus' voyages to the New World. I would like to add a third, which was the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gama's rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, voyages across the Indian Ocean and arrival in South Asia in 1498 (cf. Cliff 2013). What is unique about these three events is that Islamophobia was one of the main drivers in each.
In each case of the three aforementioned European expansions, explorers, colonizers and their missions were driven by a desire for trade, conquest, and to overcome the Muslims as a political enemy and exploit them for the Western Christians to fulfill their spiritual destinies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ontological conceptions of who was considered human or not according to the exclusionary logic of early Christianity (early modernity) and then Europe (late modernity) did not initially change much theoretically between the old and new world, especially in early modernity. (16th-18th century). What ultimately changed in modernity over a period of several centuries was the material and epistemic effects of global power relations and how theories of ontological exclusion were applied materially. It was only during the long span of five centuries of eventual Western hegemony, after the 15th century, that coloniality settled to such an extent that the balance of power changed from relatively symmetrical between "competing" pre-modern empires to asymmetrical power relations between the West and the rest.
For Maldonado-Torres, this power change in modernity/coloniality would be reflected on the ontological level by the gradual normalization of the coloniality of being. With regard to the Muslims, Maldonado-Torres specifically, and the decolonial discourse more broadly needs to better integrate how Islamophobia to a large extent laid the conditions of possibility for the rise of the modern/colonial world system. By extending and supplementing the Latin American Atlantic-centered approach to understanding the coloniality of being through the Muslim question, the decolonial discourse on race and religion broadens its historiographical canon, horizons, and tools of social analysis.
Available at: https://themaydan.com/2020/10/anti-blackness-in-the-muslim-world-beyond-apologetics-and-orientalism/. Changing Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking and Global Coloniality. Decolonizing Postcolonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.
AAR Centennial Roundtable: Religion, Conquest and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World.
