Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I have sought not to make amends between “Islam and the West”, but to dismantle altogether this illusory binary, a solid byproduct of European modernity - or what they call “Enlightenment”, and the rest of the world knows as the darkest chapters of predatory colonialism.  I … propose that we read the fetishised concept of “the West” as an ideological commodity and civilisational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicentre for the rise of globalised capitalist modernity.   —Hamid Dabashi The entire binary is false Related Excerpts from The End of Two Illusions

 “ I think we can get too distracted by minor doctrinal disputes between self-proclaimed centrists and right-wingers and miss the fact that the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing. It tends to take reactionary and anti-left positions and has done so for a long time. The names can change. People can switch institutional affiliations. But the defense of the establishment and the US-led liberal order and other Cold War verities such as classical liberalism, Western values, the Enlightenment, and Zionism remains their primary task. This is the legacy of the lucrative conformism noted by Alfred Kazin and Czeslaw Milosz.” The Liberal Establishment is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’

"[W]hile ... biblical and theological justifications for racism maintained some purchase and an ongoing foundational influence, racism as we understand it in the modern context crystallised with the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. It was through Enlightenment ideals and science that racist theories developed, spread and really gained hegemonic power. As a more humanistic and universal vision of society developed in parts of Europe, science and reason came to replace or complement older ideas. While the Enlightenment is often described uncritically as the origin of our progressive modern world, and used to demonstrate the west’s ‘civilisational superiority’, it was also inextricably linked to the rise of racism as a new pretext for domination by the white man." Excerpts from Reactionary Democracy How the racism and the populist far-right became mainstream

Alain Gresh removes Political Economy from History. He also separates the "Enlightenment" from barbarism (e.g. slavery, colonialism, etc) that co-existed with it. The West's selective reading of history

A critique  At a time when a global pandemic has only exacerbated spiraling inequalities, pervasive racism, and xenophobic insurgencies on both sides of the Atlantic, Habermas suggests that humanity already possesses the resources for levelheaded debate oriented toward the common good. Yet a tension persists between Habermas’s political ideals and his historical framework. The gap is not so much one of theory and practice, which Habermas readily acknowledges. Instead, his story’s European origin collides with its universal intent. Habermas insists that postmetaphysical reason—because it refuses to take refuge in foundational certainties—provides a basis for the inter-cultural dialogue necessary to confront global crises of climate change, mass migration, and unregulated markets. But by tracing the emergence of modern rationality solely to a Western, and Christian, learning process, he elides the historical reckoning necessary for any such dialogue. The same problem faced Haber...

Is there room for critical thinking in Islam? That's in addition to the history of atheism in Islam , the Qarmatians , the feminist movement (esp. in early 20th century). Those who don't see the role of colonialism, the Victorian morality that accompanied it, dictatorship and dependency, the failure of the nationalist-led modernization project (including 'secularism' from above) and the subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the stalinization of most the official left and repression, impeiralist domination, etc. do not see the diversity and history of Islam from Dakar to Bali.

"For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker And also a review of  Pinker's previous book on "the decline of ...

"[T]ere is something that still resonates about the work of the Frankfurt School. The insight to which it called its readers to awaken was that human consciousness in the age of mass society was becoming wholly enclosed within the walls of an ideological fortress, caught in the endless circulations of capitalist exchange and those repetitive entertainments and distractions that were designed to obscure the truth. Nothing about the theory of the culture industry lacks traction in a world where the commodity form reigns supreme. Blockbuster CGI movies; the relentless extrusion of Greatest Hits CDs by the megastars of the recording industry; the all-encompassing mania for video gaming, in which mature adults have been co-opted into the shamelessly infantile principle of mindless play; the transmutation of collectivity into social media’s mere connectivity: these are the lineaments of a culture that is not the spontaneous production of free human beings, but rather something done to...

“Dialogue” is one of those words, like “diversity”, that can mean all things to all people. It is often used to define shallow, skating-on-the-surface conversations which give the impression of an exchange but which touch upon nothing substantive. It can also mean proper, dig-deep contestations through which we test each other’s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested. In universities, and in society at large, there is today too little of the latter and too much of the former; too little real engagement and too great a desire to stay within our comfort zones. Are Soas students right to 'decolonize' their minds from Western philosophers?