The cross-categorization of “Islam and the West” … survived [Edward] Saïd’s intervention, first and foremost because the material basis of its continued validity persisted… Saïd, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world.
The West” coinvented an “Islam” best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining the illusion of its own civilizational superiority. This dual false consciousness was not merely a product of a sense of racial superiority; it was also a requirement of the economics of robbing continents of their wealth and wherewithal.
Any and all acts of decolonization are entirely contingent on dismantling all such civilizational divides as “Islam and the West,” “the First and the Third World,” “the West and the Rest,” in all of which the ruling ideological powers of the world have robbed continents of their material and labor resources and the centrality of their place in the world and have rendered them second-rate inhabitants in their own worldliness—or, in my terms, the “Islam” of the “Islam and the West” was always already a figment of a colonial imagination. Without de-fetishizing “the West,” which has fetishized all its others, none of those fetishized others, particularly Islam, will ever resume their moral and material historicalities.
—Hamid Dabashi, The End of Two Illusions, 2022
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