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Rentier Intellectuals and the End of Islamism

 The Role of the Rentier Intellectuals Under colonial duress, Muslim public intellectuals were thus the principal agents of changing their own ancestral faith into an unrecognizable site of ideological contestation with what they categorically identified as “the West”—the self-designated code with which the hegemony of colonial modernity faced and stared down the world at large. Factual relation of power between colonial modernity and Islam eventually gave rise to fictive terms of opposition between European colonial ideologues and Muslim public intellectuals. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, and in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 9/11, enough remnants of this binary supposition were resuscitated for us to see the psychopathological origin of its formulation, and the political potency of its appeal. To see how this dialectic of generating and sustaining a fabricated hostility between “Islam and the West” has worked over the last two hundred years, we c

Is It Hate?

We have heard a lot the refrain “they hate us.” “In a landmark interview in 1965 Malcolm X was asked by his interlocutor why he preached “hate to meet hate.” Malcolm X denied having ever advocated hate. The white man questioning him persisted that he had. “No,” Malcolm interjects, “that is the guilt complex of the American White Man that is so profound that when you begin to analyze the real condition of the Black Man in America, instead of the American White Man eliminating the causes that create that condition, he tries to cover it up by accusing his accusers of teaching hate.” In that singular moment of rhetorical rebuttal, Malcolm X stages a condition of dialectical reversal, where a Muslim critical thinker reasserts agency and reclaims history, not just by confronting the White Man’s monological premise but by epistemically overcoming the limitations of his moral imagination.” Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi