The Multiple Faces of Islamophobia

Author(s): Ramon Grosfoguel

Source: Islamophobia Studies Journal , Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 9-33
Published by: Pluto Journals
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 9

The Multiple Faces of Islamophobia

Ramon Grosfoguel
University of California, Berkeley

ISLAMOPHOBIA STUDIES JOURNAL

VOLUME 1, NO. 1, SPRING 2012, PP. 9-33.

Published by:
Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project,
Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley.

Disclaimer:
Statements of fact and opinion in the articles, notes, perspectives, etc. in the
Islamophobia Studies Journal are those of the respective authors and
contributors. They are not the expression of the editorial or advisory board
and staff. No representation, either expressed or implied, is made of the
accuracy of the material in this journal and ISJ cannot accept any legal
responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. The
reader must make his or her own evaluation of the accuracy and
appropriateness of those materials.

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 10 ISJ 1:1(2012)

The Multiple Faces of Islamophobia

Ramon Grosfoguel
University of California, Berkeley

Reprinted with permission from Human Architecture (Volume 1, Issue 1,

Fall 2006).

Any discussion of Islamophobia today has to depart from a discussion

about the cartography of power of the “world-system” for the past 518 years.
If we understand the “modern world-system” as a system organized solely in
terms of an international division of labor and a global inter-state system,
Islamophobia would then be an epiphenomenon of the political-economy of
the world-system and, in particular, of the ceaseless accumulation of capital
at a world-scale. However, if we shift the geopolitics of knowledge and the
body-politics of knowledge from a North oriented gaze of the World-System
towards a South oriented view, we get a different picture of the global
cartography of power. From a Southern perspective, the world-system is
organized not only around an international division of labor and a global
inter-state system, but include, not as additive elements but as constitutive of
the capitalist accumulation at a world-scale, a global racial/ethnic hierarchy
(Western vs. non-Western peoples), a global patriarchal hierarchy (global
gender system and a global sexual system), a global religious hierarchy, a
global linguistic hierarchy, a global epistemic hierarchy, etc (see Grosfoguel
2006). The “package” of entangled power hierarchies of the world-system is
broader and more complex than what is frequently theorized in world-
system analysis. For the sake of economizing space, when we use the term
“world-system” in this essay, we refer to the “modern/colonial Westernized
Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Ibid). At the risk of
sounding ridiculous, we prefer a long phrase like this to characterize the
present heterarchical structure (multiple power hierarchies entangled to
each other in complex historical ways) of the world-system, than the limited
characterization of a single hierarchy called “capitalist world-system” with
capital accumulation as the single logic of the system (Ibid). The latter leads
to an economic reductionist understanding of the world-system, while the
former leads to a more complex, non-reductive structural-historical analysis.
Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people is not an
epiphenomenon but constitutive of the international division of labor.
The first part of the essay will discuss Islamophobia as a form of
racism in a world-historical perspective. The second part is a discussion of
Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism. The third part is on Islamphobia
as Orientalism. The fourth part is Islamophobia as epistemic racism, while

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the final part is an example of this using the case of European Islamic
Philosopher and Theologian, Tariq Ramadan.

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS A FORM OF RACISM IN WORLD-HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVE
The challenge for our topic is to answer how was it possible that a
religious difference in the pre-Modern/Colonial world turned into a
racial/ethnic difference in the modern/colonial world. In the heterarchical
conceptualization of the world-system used here, Islamophobia would be
the subalternization and inferiorization of Islam produced by the Christian-
centric religious hierarchy of the world-system since the end of the 15
century. The year 1492 is a crucial foundational year for the understanding
of the present system. In this year, the Christian Spanish Monarchy re-
conquered Islamic Spain expelling Jews and Arabs from the Spanish
Peninsula while simultaneously “discovered” the Americas and colonized
indigenous peoples. The Arab and Jewish population that was left inside the
Iberian Peninsula were forced to convert to Christianity. Marranos
(converted Jews) and Moriscos (converted Muslims) were the terms used at
the time to classify these “Christianized” populations. The whole 16th
century was a century of persecution inside the Iberian Peninsula against
Moriscos until its final expulsion in 1609 (Perceval 1997) and of
enslavement of indigenous and African peoples in the Americas (Dussel
1994). These “internal” and “external” conquered territories and peoples not
only created an international capitalist division of labor of core and
periphery that overlapped with an international ethno/racial division of
labor between Western and non-Western but also constituted the internal
and external imagined boundaries of Europe. This related to the global
racial/ethnic hierarchy of the world-system privileging European origin
populations over the rest. Jews and Arabs became the non-European
subaltern internal “Others” inside Europe, while indigenous people became
the external “Others” of Europe (Mignolo 2000).
The first marker of “otherness” in the “Westernized Christian-Centric
Capitalist/Patriarchal Modern/Colonial World-System” was around religious
identity. Jews and Arabs were characterized as “people with the wrong
religion” while indigenous people were constructed as “people without
religion” (Maldonado-Torres 2006). In the global racial/ethnic hierarchy
produced by the two major events of 1492, the “people without religion,”
that is “people without God” were at the bottom of the hierarchy. While
“people with the wrong religion,” that is, “people with the wrong God”
occupied a different position in this hierarchy. How did “people with the
wrong religion” turned into “people below the human”, that is, racially
inferior people?
The struggle of Christian Spain against Islam formed part of a long
imperial struggle in the Mediterranean Sea that goes back to the crusades.
The Christian vs. Islam struggle articulated what Walter Mignolo (2000)

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 12 ISJ 1:1(2012)

 
characterizes as the “imperial difference,” while the post-1492 Spanish vs.
Indigenous struggle in the Americas articulated the “colonial difference.”
The “imperial difference” after 1492 is the result of the imperial relations
between European empires versus Non-European Empires and we will
characterize it here as the result of the “imperial relation”. The “colonial
difference” is the result of the colonial relations between European and non-
European peoples and we will characterize it here as a result of the
“colonial relation.” Historically, the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from
Christian Spain in the name of “purity of blood” was a proto-racist process
(not yet fully racist, although the consequences were not that different).
“Purity of blood” was not used as a racial term but as a technology of power
to trace the religious ancestry of the population. However, “purity of blood”
will not become a full racist perspective until much later and only after the
application of the notion of the “purity of blood” to indigenous peoples in
the Americas.
Indigenous peoples characterized in the late 15 century and early
th
16 century as “people without God” in the Christian Spanish imaginary
became inferior sub-human or non-human beings. It is this inferiorization
below the “human,” to the level of animals, which turned indigenous
peoples in the Americas into the first racialized subject of the
modern/colonial world inaugurated in 1492 (Dussel 1994). This racist
imaginary was extended to new “people without God” such as sub-Saharan
Africans transferred massively to the Americas as part of the European slave
trade after the infamous debate between Sepulveda and Las Casas in the
School of Salamanca in the 1550s. Sepulveda defended that indigenous
people had no soul, therefore, were not humans and could be enslaved
without representing a sin in the eyes of God. While Las Casas argued that
they were savages with a soul, that is, culturally inferior, child like and,
therefore, are humans to be Christianized rather than enslaved. Both
represent the initial formal articulation of the two forms of racism that
continued for the next five centuries to come. Sepulveda represented a
biological racist discourse while Las Casas a cultural racist discourse.
Las Casas argued that “Indians” should be incorporated in the
encomienda (a form of semi-feudal coerced labor) and called to bring
Africans to replace them as slaves in the plantations. After all, Africans were
characterized by Las Casas not only as “people without religion” but also as
“people without soul.” The argument here is that the racist imaginary that
was built against the Indigenous people of the new world was then extended
to all non-European peoples starting with the African slave trade in the mid-
16th century.
The important issue for our topic is how this racist imaginary was
extended even to people that were characterized as “people with the wrong
God” in the late 15 century. As the European Empires relations with the
Islamic Empires turned from an “imperial relation” into a “colonial relation”
(the Spanish destruction of Al-Andalus in the late 15 century and the

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 13

 
subsequent domination of Moriscos in the 16th century, the Dutch
colonization of Indonesia in the 17th Century, British colonization of India in
the 18th century, French and British colonization of the Middle East in the
19th Century and the demise and subsequent division of the Ottoman Empire
among several European Empires at the end of the First World War), the
notion of “people with the wrong God” in the Theological Christian
imaginary of the late 15th century were inferiorized as animals in the 16th
and 17th century (Perceval 1992, 1997) and later this theological racial
foundation secularized into a “scientific evolutionary hierarchical
civilizational” imaginary that turned the late 15th century “people with the
wrong religion” (imperial difference) into the inferior “savages and
primitives” of “people without civilization” (colonial difference) in the 19th
century. This process represented a crucial transformation from the
inferiorization of non-Christian religions (such as Islam, Judaism, etc.) to the
inferioriorization of the human beings practicing those religions (such as
Muslims and Jews turned into Semites, that is, a race inferior to Europeans).
This discursive mutation was central to the entanglement between the
inferiorization of religion and the racism against non-European human beings
practicing those religions. The Christian-centric global religious hierarchy
and the Eurocentric global racial/ethnic hierarchy were increasingly
entangled and the distinction between practicing a non-Christian religion
and being racialized as an inferior human being became increasingly erased.

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS A FORM OF CULTURAL RACISM

Moreover, in the last 60 years there has been a historical
transformation in racist discourses. While biological racist discourses
declined, cultural racism became the hegemonic form of racism in the late
world-system (Grosfoguel 2003). The defeat of Nazi Germany, the anti-
colonial struggles and the civil rights movements of colonial minorities
inside the Western Empires created the historical and political conditions for
the transition from biological racism to cultural racism. The White elites of
the world-system did not give up on their racism. They shifted the meanings
and discourses of “race” as a respond to the challenges from the struggles of
colonized people. Cultural racism is a form of racism where the word “race”
is not even mentioned. It is focused on the cultural inferiority of a group of
people. Usually it is framed in terms of the inferior habits, beliefs, behavior,
or values of a group of people. It is close to biological racism in the sense
that cultural racism naturalizes/essentializes the culture of the
racialized/inferiorized people. The latter are represented as fixed in a
timeless space.
In the new cultural racist discourses, religion has a dominant role.
The contemporary tropes about “uncivilized,” “barbarian,” “savage,”
“primitive,” “underdeveloped,” “authoritarian,” and “terrorist” inferior
people are today concentrated in the “other’s” religious practices and
believes. By focusing on the “other’s” religion, the Europeans, Euro-

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 14 ISJ 1:1(2012)

 
Americans and Euro-Israelis manage to escape being accused of racism.
However, when we examine carefully the hegemonic rhetoric in place, the
tropes are a repetition of old biological racist discourses and the people who
are the target of Islamophobic discourses are the traditional colonial subjects
of the Western Empires, that is, the “usual suspects”.
Only within the outlined long durée historical continuities together
with the recent hegemony of cultural racism, can we understand the
relationship between Islamophobia and racism today. It is absolutely
impossible to delink the hate or fear against Muslims from racism against
non-European people. Islamophobia and cultural racism are entangled and
overlapping discourses. The association of Muslims with the colonial
subjects of Western empires in the minds of white populations is simply a
given in the core of the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-
system.” This links Islamophobia to an old colonial racism that is still alive
in the world today, especially in the metropolitan centers.
In Great Britain, Muslims are associated to Egyptians, Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis (colonial subjects from old British colonies). Islamophobia in
Britain is associated with anti-Black, anti-Arab and anti-South Asian racism.
In France, Muslims are mostly North Africans (from old colonies such as
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, etc.). In The Netherlands, Muslims are
mostly from guest workers and colonial migrants coming from Turkey,
Morocco, Indonesia and Suriname. Islamophobia in The Netherlands is
associated to racism against guest worker migrants and old colonial
subjects. So Islamophobia as a fear or hate of Muslims is associated with
anti-Arab, anti-Asian and anti-Black racisms. In Germany, Islam is
associated with anti-Turk racism, while in Spain with anti-Moor racism.
Similarly, in the United States, Islam is associated with African-Americans
and Arabs of all ethnicities. Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects of the US
empire are also suspicious subjects in the Islamophobic hysteria.1 Latinos
are the largest growing populations of converts to Islam in the USA. This
makes them also a target of the neo-fascist policies of the US state.
Moreover, after 911 the Bush Administration associated illegal immigrants
with terrorism and national security leading to the increased militarization of
the US-Mexico border.
It does not matter if the Western domestic political system is the
British multicultural model or the French Republican model the fact is that
none is working. Without overcoming the problem of racial discrimination,
racism becomes a corrosive process that end up destroying the abstract
                                                                                                               
1
See the case of Jose Padilla, a Puerto Rican from Chicago, who has spent more than three
years in an isolated military prison without any charges. Even though Puerto Ricans are US
citizens, the neo-fascist law of the US Patriot Act, allows the unlimited incarceration of U.S.
citizen without legal charges and procedures in a civil court. The initial public accusation
against Padilla made by US authorities at the time of his arrest was that he supposedly had a
document to build a domestic atomic bomb in his apartment in Chicago. The accusation is
so ridiculous that they kept him incarcerated without a due procedure in the courts for
several years.

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 15

 
ideals of the each model. In the case of the Anglo-American world,
multiculturalism and diversity operates to conceal White Supremacy. The
racial minorities are allowed to celebrate their history, carnaval and identity
as long as they leave intact the white supremacy racial/ethnic hierarchy of
the status quo. The dominant system in the United Kingdom, Canada and
the United States is an institutionalized and concealed “White affirmative
action” that benefits Whites on a daily bases and at all levels of social
existence. It is so powerful that it has become normalized to the point of not
being stated as such.
In the French republican model, the formal system of equality
operates with an institutionalized and normalized “comunitarisme masculin
blanc.” If racial/gender/sexual minorities protest against discrimination, they
are accused by the “communistaristes masculin blanc” in power to be acting
as “communitaristes.” As if the elites in power were racial and gender
blind/neutral, behaving towards everybody with a “universal principle of
equality.” White supremacy in France operates with the myth of a “racially
blind society.” “Racially-blind racism” is institutionalized and normalized in
France to the point that makes invisible the discriminatory
“communistarisme masculin blanc” in power.
Islamophobia is a case in point. The so-called neutrality of the West
is contradicted when Muslims affirm their practices and identities in the
public sphere and when they make claims against discrimination in
education or the labor market as citizens with equal rights within Western
states. The Veil Law in France against Muslim women use of the veil in
public institutions or the incarceration without due procedure and torture of
thousands of Muslims in the United States are just recent instances in a long
list of grievances.
At a world level, Islamophobia has been the dominant discourse used
in the post-civil rights and post-independence era of dominant cultural racist
discourses against Arabs. The events of 911 escalated anti-Arab racism
through an Islamophobic hysteria all over the world, specifically among the
dominant elites of the United States and Israel. The latter is not surprising
given US and Israeli representation of Palestinians, Arabs and Islamic people
in general as terrorist decades before 911 (Said 1979; 1981). The
responsibility of US foreign policy is never linked to the tragic events of 911.
US Cold War against the Evil Empire in Afghanistan during the 1980s
financed, supported and created a global network of Islamic fundamentalist
terrorist groups called at the time “Freedom Fighters” that came back to hunt
them on 911 (Johnson 2006). The USA was complicit in Osama Bin-Laden
and Al-Queda operations as part of CIA global/imperial designs and
operations against the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. However, it is easier
to blame Arab people and use racist Islamphobic arguments rather than to
critically examine US foreign policy for the past 50 years. The same applies
to Saddam Hussein, who was a loyal US ally and fought a CIA sponsored
dirty war against Iran following US imperial/global designs during the 1980s

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 16 ISJ 1:1(2012)

 
and was later declared a U.S. enemy and falsely accused by the U.S. elites
to have links to Al Queda in order to justify a long-planned war against Iraq
(Risen 2006).
It is symptomatic that in most Western countries, Arabs are still
perceived as if they were “the majority of Muslims in the world” even
though they are only 1/5 of the Muslims’ total world population. This is
related to the West global/imperial designs for domination and exploitation
of Oil in the Middle East and Arabs resistance against it. The long term
exaggerated image of Arabs as terrorist and violent in Western Media
(newspapers, movies, radio, television, etc.) has been fundamental in the
new wave of anti-Arab racism linked to an Islamophobic discourse through
cultural racism before and after 911 (Said 1981). It is not accidental that
Anti-Arab racism accounts for most Islamophobia in the West. Even Muslims
from South Asia and African origin living in the West get part of the heat of
the anti-Arab racism, especially in the United States (Salaita 2006).

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS ORIENTALISM
One of the cultural racist arguments used against Islamic people
today is their “patriarchal and sexist abuses of women.” As part of the
construction of Islamic people as inferior in relation to the West, an
important argument to sustain their “uncivilized” and “violent”
values/behavior is the oppression of women at the hands of men. It is ironic
to hear Western patriarchal and Christian conservative fundamentalist
figures talk as if they were defenders of feminism when they talk about
Islam. George W. Bush main argument to invade Afghanistan was the need
to liberate brown women from the atrocities of brown men. The hypocrisy
of the argument is clear when the Bush Administration was actively
defending Christian patriarchal fundamentalism, opposing abortion and
women’s civil/social rights during the eight years of its Administration in the
United States, while using a women’s rights argument against the Taliban’s
to invade Afghanistan. The rhetoric of “White men as saviors of Women of
color from color men’s patriarchal abuses” goes back to colonial times. It
has served historically to conceal the real reasons behind the White men
colonization of the non-West. We now know that the real reasons behind
Bush Administration invasion of Afghanistan and Obama Administration
continuity is due to its geopolitical strategic location and importance in
terms of its closeness to oil and gas in South Asia. Immediately after the
invasion, occupied Afghanistan provided legal permission to gas and oil
transnational companies to built pipelines over its territory (Rashid 2001).
Islamophobic representations of Muslim people as savages in need of
Western civilizing missions is the main argument used to cover-up
global/imperial military and economic designs.
Moreover, the colonization of Islam by patriarchy is not unique to
Islam. We can see the same abuses against women held among Christians
(Catholic and Protestants) or Jewish men. You can find as many patriarchal

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and sexist arguments in Christian texts as Jewish or Muslim texts. However,
the sexist and patriarchal characterization of Islam is what is represented in
the press while there is almost silence about the patriarchal oppression of
women sustained and practiced by Judaism and Christianity in the West. It is
important to say that Islam was the first religion in the world to acknowledge
women the right to divorce more than one thousand years ago. The
Christian world acknowledged women the right to divorce only very
recently in the late 20th century and the Catholic Church and many
countries still does not recognize it. We are saying this not to justify
patriarchal abuses over women done by some Muslim men but to question
the stereotypical racial representation that makes of only Muslim men the
source of abuses against women around the world. This Islamophobic
argument is incoherent, inconsistent and false. It only serves Western
global/imperial designs.
Thus, what we have in the world today is not a clash of civilizations
but a clash of fundamentalisms (Ali 2002) and a clash of patriarchies. Bush
administration defended Christian fundamentalist arguments to characterize
the “Islamic enemy” as a part of the old crusade wars, while Islamic
fundamentalists use a similar language (Ibid). The former defends a Western
form of patriarchy with the Christian monogamist family at its center in the
name of civilization and progress, while the latter defends a non-Western
forms of patriarchy with polygamy for men (not for women) authorized as
central to the family structure. However, as Islamic feminist have sustained,
patriarchal versions of Islam are not inherently Islamic but represents the
colonization of Islam by patriarchy (Mernisi 1987). The interpretation of the
original sacred scriptures where hijacked by men throughout the history of
Islam.
The same thing could be said of the Jewish and Christian sacred texts.
Interpretations were controlled by patriarchal interpretations of the
scriptures as the dominant perspective in these world religions. Therefore,
there is no “Patriarchy” as a single system in the world-system today, but
“patriarchies” in the sense of several systems of gender domination of males
over women. However, what is fundamental to emphasize is that the
patriarchal system that was globalized in the present world-system is the
Western Christian form of patriarchy. Non-Western forms of patriarchy have
co-existed with the West in peripheral regions of the world-system and in
many epochs of colonial history the West was complicit with them in their
colonial/imperial projects. To talk as if patriarchy, as a system of gender
domination, is external to the West and located in Islam is a historical
Orientalist distortion that goes back to Western racist representations of
Islam in the 18th Century. European colonial expansion has exported not
only capitalism and militarism but also Christian patriarchy around the
world.
It is important to keep in mind that Orientalist views are
characterized by racist exotic and inferior essentialist representations of

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 18 ISJ 1:1(2012)

 
Islam as frozen in time (Said 1979). These Orientalist representations of
Islam after the 18th century were preceded by three hundred years of
Occidentalism (the superiority of the West over the Rest) from the late 15-
century until the emergence of Orientalism in the 18th century (Mignolo
2000). The historical and political condition of possibility for Orientalism to
emerge is Occidentalism.

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS EPISTEMIC RACISM

Occidentalism created the epistemic privilege and the hegemonic
identity politics of the West from which to judge and produce knowledge
about the “Others.” The ego-politics of knowledge of Rene Descartes in the
17th century where Western Men replaces God as the foundation of
knowledge is the foundational bases of Modern Western Philosophy.
However, as Enrique Dussel (1994), Latin American philosopher of
liberation, remind us, Descartes’ ego-cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) was
preceded by 150 years of the ego-conquirus (“I conquer, therefore I am”).
The God-eye view defended by Descartes transferred the attributes of the
Christian God to Western men (the gender here is not accidental). But this
was only possible from an Imperial Being, that is, from the subjectivity of
someone who is at the center of the world because he has conquered it.
The myth about the Western males capacity to produce a knowledge
that is Universal beyond time and space was fundamental to imperial/global
designs. The Cartesian ego-politics of knowledge inaugurated what
Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the “point zero”
perspective. The “point zero” perspective is the Western myth of a point of
view that assumes itself to be beyond a point of view. This myth allowed
Western men to claim its knowledge to be universal, neutral, and objective.
Contemporary authors like Samuel Huntington (1997) reproduces a
combination of old Occidentalism with Orientalism. The superiority of the
West is taken for granted and the epistemic privilege of Western identity
politics from which to produce judgments of the “Other” and
global/imperial designs around the world is an unquestioned presupposition.
What is the relevance of this epistemic discussion to Islamophobia? It
is from a Western hegemonic identity politics and epistemic privilege that
the rest of the epistemologies and cosmologies in the world are
subalternized as myth, religion, folklore or culture downgrading non-
Western knowledge below the status of philosophy and science. It is also
from this hegemonic epistemic location that Western thinkers produce
Orientalism about Islam. The former leads to epistemic racism, that is, the
inferiorization and subalternization of non-Western knowledge while the
ladder leads to Orientalism. The subalternization and inferiorization of Islam
was not merely a downgrading of Islam as spirituality but also as an
epistemology.
Islamic critical thinkers are considered inferior to the
Western/Christian thinkers. The superiority of Western epistemology allows

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the West to construct with authority the Islamic “Other” as inferior people
frozen in time. Epistemic racism leads to the Orientalization of Islam. This is
crucial because Islamophobia as a form of racism is not exclusively a social
phenomenon but is also an epistemic question. Epistemic racism allows the
West to not have to listen to the critical thinking produced by Islamic
thinkers on Western global/imperial designs. The thinking coming from non-
Western locations is not considered worthy of attention except to represent
it as “uncivilized,” “primitive”, “barbarian,” and “backward.” Epistemic
racism allows the West to unilaterally decide what is best for Muslim people
today and obstruct any possibility for a serious inter-cultural dialogue.
Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people is not only
manifested in the labor market, education, public sphere, global war against
terrorism or the global economy, but also in the epistemological
battleground about the definition of the priorities of the world today.
Recent events such as the September 11 attack in US territory (911),
the riots in Parisian “banlieues”, anti-immigrant xenophobia, the
demonstrations against Danish cartoons of the Prophet, the bombing of
London Metro Stations, the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections,
the resistance of Hezbollah to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of
Spanish suburban trains (311), and the nuclear energy conflict with Iran
have been all encoded in Islamophobic language in the Western public
sphere. Western politicians (with the exception of Rodriguez Zapatero in
Spain) and mainstream media have been complicit if not active participants
of Islamophobic reactions to the outlined events. Epistemic racism as the
most invisible form of racism, contributes to legitimate an artillery of
experts, advisers, specialists, officials, academics and theologians that keep
talking with authority about Islam and Muslim people despite their absolute
ignorance of the topic and their Islamophobic prejudices. This artillery of
intellectuals producing Orientalist knowledge about the inferiority of Islam
and its people has been going on since the 16th century in Spain (Perceval
1992) and since the 18th century in France and England (Said 1979). They
contribute to the Western arrogant dismissal of Islamic thinkers.
Epistemic racism and epistemic sexism are the most hidden forms of
racism and sexism in the global system we all inhabit, the
“Westernized/Christianized modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-
system” (see Grosfoguel 2008). Social, political, and economic racisms and
sexisms are much more visible and recognized today than epistemological
racism/sexism. However, epistemic racism is the foundational form and an
old version of racism in that the inferiority of “non-Western” people as
below the line of the human human (non-humans or sub-humnans) is
defined on their closeness to animality and the latter is defined on the basis
of their inferior intelligence and, thus, lack of rationality. Epistemic racism
operates through the privileging of an essentialist (“identity”) politics of
“Western” male elites, that is, the hegemonic tradition of thought of Western
philosophy and social theory that almost never includes “Western” Women

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and never includes “non-Western” philosophers/philosophies and social
scientists (males and females). In this tradition, the “West” is considered to
be the only legitimate tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and
the only one with access to “universality,” “rationality” and “truth.”
Epistemic racism considers “non-Western” knowledge to be inferior to
“Western” knowledge. Since epistemic racism is entangled with epistemic
sexism, Western-centric social science is a form of epistemic racism/sexism
that privilege “Western” male’s knowledge as the superior knowledge in the
world today.
If we take the canon of thinkers privileged within Western academic
disciplines, we can observe that without exception they privilege “Western”
male thinkers and theories, above all those of European and Euro-North-
American males. This hegemonic essentialist “identity politics” is so
powerful and so normalized - through the discourse of “objectivity” and
“neutrality” of the Cartesian “ego-politics of knowledge” in the social
sciences - that it hides who speaks and from which power location they
speak from, such that when we think of “identity politics” we immediately
assume, as if by “common sense,” that we are talking about racialized
minorities. In fact, without denying the existence of essentialist “identity
politics” among racialized minorities, the hegemonic “identity politics”—
that of Eurocentric male discourse—uses this identitarian, racist, sexist
discourse to discard all critical interventions rooted in epistemologies and
cosmologies coming from oppressed groups and “non-Western” traditions of
thought (Maldonado-Torres 2008). The underlying myth of the Westernized
academy is still the scientificist discourse of “objectivity” and “neutrality”
which hides the “locus of enunciation” of the speaker, that is, who speaks
and from what epistemic body-politics of knowledge and geopolitics of
knowledge they speak from in the existing power relations at a world-scale.
Through the myth of the “ego-politics of knowledge” (which in reality
always speaks through a “Western” male body and a Eurocentric geopolitics
of knowledge) critical voices coming from individuals and groups
inferiorized and subalternized by this hegemonic epistemic racism and
epistemic sexism are denied and discarded as particularistic. If epistemology
has color—as African philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997) points
out so well—and has gender/color—as African-American Sociologist
Patricia Hills Collins (1991) has argued—then the Eurocentric epistemology
that dominates the social sciences has both color and gender. The
construction of the epistemology of “Western” males as superior and the rest
of the world as inferior forms an inherent part of the epistemological
racism/sexism which has prevailed in the world-system for more than 500
years.
The epistemic privilege of the “West” was consecrated and
normalized through the Spanish Catholic monarchy’s destruction of Al-
Andalus and the European colonial expansion since the late 15th century.
From renaming the world with Christian cosmology (Europe, Africa, Asia,

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and later, America) and characterizing all non-Christian knowledge as a
product of pagan and devil forces, to assuming in their own Eurocentric
provincialism that it is only within the Greco-Roman tradition, passing
through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Western sciences that
“truth” and “universality” is achieved, the epistemic privilege of Western,
Eurocentric, male “identity politics” was normalized to the point of
invisibility as a hegemonic “identity politics.” It became the universal
normalized knowledge. In this way, all “other” traditions of thought were
deemed inferior (characterized in the 16th century as “barbarians,” in the
19th century as “primitives,” in the 20th century as “underdeveloped,” and at
the beginning of the 21st century as “anti-democratic”). Hence, since the
formation of Western Liberal Social Sciences in the 19th century, both
epistemic racism and epistemic sexism have been constitutive of its
disciplines and knowledge production. Western social sciences assume the
inferiority, partiality, and the lack of objectivity in its knowledge-production
of “non-Western” knowledge and the superiority of the “West.” As a result,
Western social theory is based on the experience of 5 countries (France,
England, Germany, Italy and the United States) that makes only less than 12
percent of the world population. The provincialism of Western Social
Science social theory with false claims to universality, pretends to account
for the social experience of the other 88 percent of the world population. In
sum, Eurocentrism with its epistmic racism/sexism is a form of provincialism
that is reproduced inside the social sciences today.
Against this hegemonic “identity politics” that always privileged
Christian and Western beauty, knowledge, traditions, spiritualities, and
cosmologies while deeming as inferior and subaltern the non-Christian and
non-Western beauty, knowledge, traditions, spiritualities, and cosmologies,
those subjects rendered inferior and subaltern by these hegemonic
discourses developed their own “identity politics” as a reaction to the racism
of the former. This process is necessary as part of a process of self-
valorization in a racist world that renders them inferior and disqualifies their
humanity. However, this process of identitarian affirmation has its limits if it
leads to fundamentalist proposals that invert the binary terms of the
hegemonic “Western” Males Eurocentric racist and sexist philosophical
tradition of thought. For example, if it is assumed that subaltern non-
Western ethnic/racial groups are superior and that the dominant Western
racial/ethnic groups are inferior, they are merely inverting the terms of
hegemonic Western racism without overcoming its fundamental problem,
that is, the racism that renders some human beings inferior and the elevation
of others to the category of superior on cultural or biological grounds
(Grosfoguel 2003). Another example is that of accepting—as do some
Islamic and Afrocentric fundamentalists—the hegemonic fundamentalist
Eurocentric discourses that the European tradition is the only one that is
naturally and inherently democratic, whereas the non-European “others” are
presumed to be naturally and inherently authoritarian, denying democratic

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discourses and forms of institutional democracy to the non-Western world
(which are, of course, distinct from Western liberal democracy), and as a
result, supporting political authoritarianism. This is what all Third World
fundamentalists do when they accept the Eurocentric fundamentalist false
premise that the only democratic tradition is the Western one, and,
therefore, assume that democracy does not apply to their “culture” and their
“societies,” defending monarchical, authoritarian and/or dictatorial forms of
political authority. This merely reproduces an inverted form of Eurocentric
essentialism. The idea that “democracy” is inherently “Western” and that
“non-democratic” forms are inherently “non-Western” is shared both by
Eurocentric fundamentalist discourses and its varieties such as “Third
Worldist” fundamentalisms.
The “divisions” that results from these identity politics ends up
reproducing in an inverted form the same essentialism and fundamentalism
of the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse. If we define fundamentalism as
those perspectives that assumes their own cosmology and epistemology to
be superior and as the only source of truth, inferiorizing and denying
equality to other epistemologies and cosmologies, then Eurocentrism is not
merely a form of fundamentalism but the hegemonic fundamentalism in the
world today. Those Third Worldist fundamentalisms (Afrocentric, Islamist,
Indigenist, etc.) that emerge in response to the hegemonic Eurocentric
fundamentalism and that the “Western” press put in the front pages of
newspapers everyday are subordinated forms of Eurocentric fundamentalism
insofar as they reproduced and leave intact the binary, essentialist, racial
hierarchies of Eurocentric fundamentalism (Grosfoguel 2009).
In sum, a political consequence of this epistemological discussion is
that a foundational basis on contemporary discussions on political Islam, on
democracy and on the so-called “War on Terrorism” is “epistemic racism.”
“Western” epistemic racism by inferiorizing “non-Western” epistemologies
and cosmologies and by privileging “Western” epistemology as the superior
form of knowledge and as the only source to define human rights,
democracy, citizenship, etc. ends up disqualifying the “non-West” as unable
to produce democracy, justice, human rights, scientific knowledge, etc. This
is grounded in the essentialist idea that reason and philosophy lies in the
“West” while non-rational thinking lies in the “rest.”

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS INTELLECTUAL IRRESPONSIBILITY: THE WESTERN

CASE AGAINST TARIQ RAMADAN
It is interesting to analyze the Western reaction to a critical European
Islamic thinker such as Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, who identifies himself as
a European Muslim, has been the victim of a Western campaign to distort
his image and his thought in the eyes of Western audiences. In France, he is
not allowed to speak in Universities2 and in the United States he has been
                                                                                                               
2
During the years when Sarkozy was Minister of the Interior in France, Tariq Ramadan was
banned from speaking in public Universities.

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banned by Homeland Security to enter the country3. The Western media
campaign against his thought characterizes him as some kind of “Islamic
fundamentalist extremist” despite the fact that he is an Islamic reformer.
Even Western Universities such as Notre Dame University (where he was
offered the Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Building
before being banned from the country by Homeland Security) and Oxford
University in England (where he is a visiting scholar today) acknowledge the
contributions of Tariq Ramadan to Islamic reform. The question is why is a
reformist European Islamic thinker (critical of Islamic fundamentalism,
suicide bombers, lapidation against women, terrorism, etc.) attacked and
misrepresented as some kind of Islamic extremist? Hani Ramadan, the
brother of Tariq, is a declared Islamic fundamentalist and despite his many
books and influence, has never been the target of a huge Western negative
campaign such as against Tariq.
In my view, for the West it is more difficult to swallow a moderate
Islamic reformer thinker critical of both Eurocentric fundamentalism and
Islamic fundamentalism than a declared Islamic fundamentalist thinker. The
latter confirms all of the Orientalist Islamophobic prejudices that the West
constructs against Islam, while the former challenges those representations.
This why both the New York Times and Le Monde have dedicated front
pages of their daily newspaper to the “Tariq Ramadan’s affair.”4 The former
due to the Homeland Security policy, while the latter way before his ban
from the USA.
In France as well as all over Western Europe, Tariq Ramadan is very
popular among Muslim European youth. His message to Muslim youth is
that you can be European and Muslim at the same time. This challenges one
of the most sacred myths of European identity politics, which is that in order
to be European you have to be Christian or secular (identified with Western
thought and Christian cosmology/values even if you are not a believer).
Moreover, he calls Muslim youth to exercise their citizenship rights as
Muslim Europeans and intervene in the public sphere making claims for
equlity and contributions to the society. This has been too subversive both
                                                                                                               
3
It is important to say that recently, in January 2010, the Obama Administration eliminated
Homeland Security’s prohibition for Tariq Ramadan to enter the United States.
4
Among the many articles published by Le Monde on Tariq Ramadan see the front page
title “Tariq Ramadan, sa famille, ses réseaux, son idéologie” (23 Décembre 2003) and the
recent article “Tariq Ramadan consultant de Tony Blair” (25 Février 2006). When a
newspaper becomes so obsess as to dedicate the main title of the front page of one of their
issues to investigate Tariq Ramadan’s suspicious “doble discourse,” you know there is
something out of proportion and exaggerated going on. The New York Times has a less
active propaganda (maybe because Ramadan is less known and influential among USA’s
Muslim youth) and more balanced accounts compared to Le Monde, but still with lots of
insinuations and suspicious comments. Among many articles from the New York Times see
the front page article “Mystery of the Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by the U.S.”
(October 6, 2004) and “World Briefing: Europe: Switzerland: Barred Islamic Scholar Gives
Up U.S. Teaching Post” (December 15, 2004).
 

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to Islamic fundamentalists and for mainstream Eurocentric Europeans to
accept. Thus, the Islamophobic campaign against his thinking.
The French newspaper Le Monde has been actively attacking
Ramadan as an Islamic fundamentalist that uses a “double discourse” since
the times when he was banned from France in the mid-1990s. Later, when
France’s ban was lifted, Le Monde’s campaign against Ramadan’s “double
language” has continued until these days. What is interesting is the double
standard and epistemic racism behind this accusation. They apply different
rules of judgment when dealing with a European intellectual thinking from
Western tradition, than a European intellectual thinking from the Islamic
tradition. An intellectual that is attacked as promoter of a “double
discourse”, that is, accused of “what he/she says and writes is not really
what he/she believes,” have no way to defend himself/herself.
The rule of judgment about the work of any intellectual is based on
what he/she says and writes. But if the accusation is that what she/he says
and writes is false because he/she has a “double discourse”, then there is no
self-defense against this accusation. Whatever the accused intellectual
argues, it becomes tautologically an argument against him/herself. No
matter how many times Tariq Ramadan has publicly denounced women
oppression and lapidating, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, his
brother’s fundamentalist views on Islam, Saudi Arabia and Taliban
fundamentalist views on Islam, suicide bombers and so on, Le Monde and
other French intellectuals keep attacking him as a believer in these things
without any evidence nor serious reading of his work and public speeches
to sustain these arguments because the claim is that he has a “double
discourse.” These standards of judgment are never applied to Western
intellectuals. The double standard shows that Islamophobia forms part of
Western epistemic racism. In sum, Islamophobia as a form of racism against
Muslim people is not only manifested in the labor market, education, public
sphere, global war against terrorism or the global economy, but also in the
epistemological battleground about the definition of the priorities in the
world today. Epistemic islamophobia is a fundamental aspect of racism
against Muslims.

ISLAMOPHOBIA AS EUROCENTRIC SOCIAL SCIENCES

As I have tried to argue along this article, epistemic racism in the
form of epistemic Islamophobia is a foundational and constitutive logic of
the modern/colonial world and of its legitimate forms of knowledge
production. European humanists and scholars since the 16th century have
argued that Islamic knowledge is inferior to the West. The debate about
Moriscos in 16th century Spain were full of epistemic Islamophobic
conceptions (Perceval 1992; 1997). After the expulsion of Moriscos in the
early 17th century, the inferiorization of “Moros” continued under an
epistemic Islamophobic discourse. Influential European thinkers in the 19th

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century such as, for example, Ernst Renan “… argued that Islam was
incompatible with science and philosophy” (Ernst 2003: 20-21).
Similarly, in social sciences we have concrete manifestations of
epistemic Islamophobia in the work of classical social theories of Western-
centric patriarchal social science such as Karl Marx and Max Weber. As
Sukidi states:

Islam, according to Weber, was the polar opposite of

Calvinism. There was no double edge to predestination in
Islam. Instead, as Weber stated in Protestant Ethic (ch. 4, n.
36), Islam contains a belief in predetermination, not in
predestination, which concerned the fate of Muslims in this
world, not the next (ibid., p. 185). The doctrine of
predestination maintained by the Calvinists, which led them to
work hard as a duty (vocation, calling), is not evident among
Muslims. In fact, as Weber argued, ‘the most important thing,
the proof of the believer in predestination, played no part in
Islam’ (ibid.). Without the concept of predestination, Islam
could not provide believers with a positive attitude to this-
worldly activity. As a consequence, Muslims are condemned
to fatalism. (p. 197)

The rationalizations of doctrine and conduct of life were alien

to Islam. Weber used the belief in predestination as the key
concept to explain the rationalization of doctrine and the
conduct of life. In Calvinism, the belief in predestination could
certainly generate an ethical rigor, legalism, and rational
conduct in this-worldly activity. None of these things was
present in Islam (p. 199). Accordingly, the Islamic belief in
predestination did not lead toward rationalization of doctrine
and the conduct of life. In fact, it turned Muslims into irrational
fatalists. ‘Islam,’ in Weber’s view, ‘was diverted completely
from any really rational conduct of life by the advent of the
cult of saints, and finally by magic’ (Sukidi 2006: 200).

If we follow the logic of Weber to its final consequences, that is, that
Muslims are irrational and fatalistic people, then no serious knowledge can
come from them. What are the geopolitics of knowledge involved in
Weber’s epistemic racism about Muslim people? The geopolitics of
knowledge is the German and French orientalists’ epistemic Islamophobia
that is repeated in Weber’s verdict about Islam. For Weber, it is only the
Christian tradition that gives rise to economic rationalism and, thus, to
Western modern capitalism. Islam cannot compare to the “superiority” of
Western values in that it lacks individuality, rationality and science. Rational
science and, its derivative, rational technology are, according to Weber,
unknown to oriental civilizations. These statements are quite problematic.

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Scholars such as Saliba (2007) and Graham (2006) have demonstrated the
influence of scientific developments in the Islamic World on the West,
modern science and modern philosophy. Rationality was a central tenet of
the Islamic civilization. While Europe was in obscurantist feudal superstition
during what is known as the Middle Ages, the school of Baghdad was the
world center of intellectual and scientific production and creativity. Weber’s
and Weberians’ Orientalist views of Islam reproduce an epistemic
Islamophobia where Muslims are incapable of producing science and of
having rationality, despite the historical evidence.
But the same problem of epistemic Islamophobia we find in Marx
and Engels. Although Marx spent two months in Algiers in 1882 recovering
from a sickness, he wrote almost nothing on Islam. However, Marx had an
orientalist epistemic racist view of non-Western peoples in general of which
he did write extensively (Moore 1977). Moreover, his close collaborator,
Frederick Engels, did write about Muslim people and repeated the same
racist stereotypes that Marx used against “Oriental” people. Talking about
French colonization of Algeria, Engels said:

Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the
Arabian chief has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins
was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal
soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly
blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and
fortunate fact for the progress of civilization. The piracies of
the Barbaresque states, never interfered with by the English
government as long as they did not disturb their ships, could
not be put down but by the conquest of one of these states.
And the conquest of Algeria has already forced the Beys of
Tunis and Tripoli, and even the Emperor of Morocco, to enter
upon the road of civilization. They were obliged to find other
employment for their people than piracy… And if we may
regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been
destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were
a nation of robbers, — whose principal means of living
consisted of making excursions either upon each other, or
upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering
all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as
slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud,
noble and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and
you will find that they, as well as the more civilized nations,
are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more
cruel means. And after all, the modern bourgeois, with
civilization, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment
following him, is preferable to the feudal marauding robber,
with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.
(Engels, French Rule in Algiers, The Northern Star, January 22,

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1848, in: MECW, Vol.6, pp.469-472; quoted in S. Avineri
(1968). Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization
(Doubleday: New York, p. 43)

Engels’s option is quite clear: to support colonial expansion and bring

Western Civilization even if it is bourgeois and brutal in order to overcome
a “barbarian” state of affairs. The superiority of the “West over the rest”
and, in particular, over Muslims is quite clear in this statement. Talking
about India, the irrational fanaticism of Muslims is expressed in the
following quote of Engels:

The insurgent warfare now begins to take the character of the

Bedouins of Algeria against the French; with the difference
that the Hindoos are far from being so fanatical, and that they
are not a nation of horsemen. (Engels: New York Daily
Tribune, July 21, 1858, MECW, Vol.15, p. 583)

If there is any doubt about Marx’s shared views with Engels’s on the
inferiority of Muslims and “non-Western” people relative to the West, the
following quote is a confirmation:

… The question … is not whether the English had a right to

conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered
by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India
conquered by the Briton. England has to fulfill a double
mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the
annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the
material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks,
Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon
became Hinduized, the barbarian conquerors being, by an
eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior
civilization of their subjects. The British were the first
conquerors superior, and, therefore, inaccessible to Hindu
civilization… The day is not far distant when by a combination
of railways and steam vessel, the distance between England
and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days,
and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually
annexed to the Western World …. (Marx, “The Future Results
of the British Rule in India” written on July 22, 1853, in Marx
and Engels On Colonialism, page 81-83…)

Marx did not have much hope in the proletarian spirit of the Muslim masses
when he stated in relation to the Ottoman Empire’s expansion to Eastern
European territories the following:

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The principal power of the Turkish population in Europe,
independently of the reserve always ready to be drawn from
Asia, lies in the mob of Constantinople [Istanbul] and a few
other large towns. It is essentially Turkish, and although it finds
its principal livelihood by doing jobs for Christian capitalists, it
maintains with great jealousy the imaginary superiority and
real impunity for excesses which the privileges of Islam confer
it as compared with Christians. It is well known that this mob
in every important coup d’etat has to be won over by bribes
and flattery. It is this mob alone, with the exception of a few
colonized districts, which offers a compact and imposing mass
of Turkish population in Europe. Certainly there will be, sooner
or later, an absolute necessity for freeing one of the finest parts
of this continent from the rule of a mob, compared with which
the mob of Imperial Rome was an assemblage of sages and
heroes. (“Turkey,” New York Daily Tribune, April 7, 1853,
written by Engels at Marx’s request, quoted in S. Avineri
(1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization
(Doubleday: New York, p. 54)

For Marx, similar to Weber, Muslim people from Turkish origin are a mob of
ignorant people that made the mobs of the Roman Empire look like sages.
He called for a struggle of liberation against the Muslim mobs. Accordingly,
for Marx, Western civilization is superior and, thus, called to civilized the
non-Western Muslims. In his perspective, better is the Western colonial
expansion rather than leaving intact in a timeless stage a barbarian inferior
people.
Marx distrusted Muslim people and was convinced of the inherently
xenophobic traits in Islam and, thus, wrote apologetically about Western
colonialism. Marx said:

As the Koran treats all foreigners as foes, nobody will dare to

present himself in a Mussulman country without having taken
his precautions. The first European merchants, therefore, who
risked the chances of commerce with such a people, contrived
to secure themselves an exceptional treatment and privileges
originally personal, but afterwards extended to their whole
nation. Hence the origin of capitulations. (“The Outbreak of
the Crimean War—Moslems, Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire,” New York Daily Tribune, April 15, 1854,
quoted in S. Avineri (1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism and
Modernization (Doubleday: New York, p. 146)

Marx said, repeating the typical epistemic racism of the orientalist

vision of his time, that:

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The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it
reduce the geography and ethnography of the various peoples
to the simple convenient distinction of two nations and of two
countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel
is “harby,” i.e. the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation to
the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between
the Mussulman and the unbeliever. (“The Outbreak of the
Crimean War—Moslems, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman
Empire,” New York Daily Tribune, April 15, 1854, quoted in S.
Avineri (1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization
(Doubleday: New York, p. 144)

These simplified, essentialist and reductionist views of Islam from a

Judeo/Christian-centric, Western-centric perspective was part of the
Orientalists’ epistemic racism and condescending paternalism towards
Islamic thought of which Marx was no exception.

Marx believed that secularism was fundamental for revolution to

have a chance in Muslim lands. He said:

…if you abolish their subjection under the Koran, by a civil

emancipation, you cancel at the same time their subjection to
the clergy, and provoke a revolution in their social, political
and religious relations…. If you supplant the Koran by a code
civil, you must Occidentalize the entire structure of Byzantine
society. (“The Outbreak of the Crimean War—Moslems,
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire,” New York Daily
Tribune, April 15, 1854, quoted in S. Avineri (1968), Karl
Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (Doubleday: New
York, p. 146)

This secularist view of Marx was a typical colonial strategy promoted by the
Western Empires in order to destroy the ways of thinking and living of the
colonial subjects and, thus, impede any trace of resistance. By arguing that
Muslim people are subjected to the rule of a “religion,” Marx projected in
Islam the cosmology of the secularized Western-centric, Christian-centric
view. Islam does not consider itself a “religion” in the Westernized,
Christianized sense of a sphere separated from politics, economics, etc.
Islam is more a cosmology that follows the notion of “Tawhid” which is a
doctrine of unity, a holistic world view, that the Eurocentric Cartesian
modern/colonial world view destroyed in the West and with its colonial
expansion attempted to destroy in the rest of the world as well. The practice
of colonial Christianization in the early modern/colonial period and
secularism after the later 18th century colonial expansion was part of the
“epistemicide” and “religiouscide,” that is, the extermination of non-

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Western spirituality and ways of knowledge implemented by Western
colonial expansion. Epistemicide and “religiouscide” made possible the
colonization of the minds/bodies of colonial subjects.
If Marx and Weber are social sciences’ classical theorists, Western
social sciences are informed by epistemic Eurocentric and Islamophobic
prejudices. To decolonize the Western social sciences, it would entail many
important processes that we cannot spell out here in detail. But one of them
would be to expand the canon of social theory to incorporate as a central
component the contributions of decolonial European and non-European
social theorists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Salman Sayyid, Ali
Shariati, Anibal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, W.E.B. Dubois, Silvia
Wynter and other social theorist thinking from the underside of modernity.
To incorporate these thinkers is not a question of multiculturalism but of
creating a more rigorous and pluriversal (as opposed to universal) decolonial
social science. Ali Shariati in particular is an Islamic social scientist that
produced important critiques of Western social theorist such as Marx and is
ignored in contemporary social sciences.
Right now what we call social science is a particular, provincial
(Western male tradition of thought) defining for the rest what is social
science and what is valid, universal knowledge. To decolonize Westenized
provincial social sciences we need to move into a global inter-epistemic
horizontal dialogue among social scientists from different epistemic
traditions of thought to re-found new decolonial social sciences in a
pluriversal mode rather than the current universalistic mode. This is not an
easy task and we cannot go into the detail of what this implies in this article.
However, the transformation from universalism towards pluriversalism in the
social sciences is fundamental for moving from the framework in which one
defines for the rest (colonial social sciences) to a new paradigm where the
production of concepts and knowledge is the result of a truly inter-epistemic
horizontal universal dialogue (decolonial social sciences). This is not a call
for relativism but to think of universality as pluriversality, that is, as the result
of the inter-epistemic interaction in horizontal mode rather than the current
universalistic social sciences of mono-epistemic imperial/colonial
interaction with the rest of the world.

(IN)CONCLUSION: ISLAMOPHOBIC DEBATES TODAY

The importance of this discussion about Islamophobia is that the
multiple faces it takes and its consequences in contemporary debates and
public policy. The islamophobic racism as a form of epistemic racism and
its derivative Eurocentric fundamentalism in social theory are manifested in
discussions about human rights and democracy today. “Non-Western”
epistemologies that define human rights and human dignity in different
terms than the West are considered inferior to “Western” hegemonic
definitions and, thus, excluded from the global conversation about these
questions. If Islamic philosophy and thought are portrayed as inferior to the

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West by Eurocentric thinkers and classical social theory, then the logical
consequence is that they have nothing to contribute to the question of
democracy and human rights and should be not only excluded from the
global conversation, but repressed. The underlying Western-centric view is
that Muslims can be part of the discussion as long as they stop thinking as
Muslims and take the hegemonic Eurocentric liberal definition of democracy
and human rights. Any Muslim that attempts to think these questions from
within the Islamic tradition is immediately suspicious of fundamentalism.
Islam and democracy or Islam and Human Rights are considered in the
hegemonic Eurocentric “common sense” an oxymoron.
The incompatibility between Islam and democracy has as its
foundation the epistemic inferiorization of the Muslim world views. Today
an artillery of epistemic racist “experts” in the West talks with authority
about Islam, with no serious knowledge of the Islamic tradition. The
stereotypes and lies repeated over and over again in Western press and
magazines ends up, like in Goebbels nazi theory of propaganda, being
believed as truth. As Edward Said said not too long time ago:

A corps of experts on the Islamic world has grown to

prominence, and during a crisis they are brought out to
pontificate on formulaic ideas about Islam on news programs
or talk shows. There also seems to have been a strange revival
of canonical, though previously discredited, Orientalist ideas
about Muslim, generally non-white, people – ideas which have
achieved a startling prominence at a time when racial or
religious misrepresentations of every other cultural group are
no longer circulated with such impunity. Malicious
generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable
form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said
about Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a
whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about
Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians…. My contention…
is that most of this is unacceptable generalization of the most
irresponsible sort, and could never be used for any other
religious, cultural, or demographic group on earth. What we
expect from the serious study of Western societies, with its
complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social
structures, histories, cultural formations, and sophisticated
languages of investigation, we should also expect from the
study and discussion of Islamic societies in the West. (Said
1998: xi-xvi)

The circulation of these stereotypes contributes to the portrayal of Muslims

as racially inferior, violent creatures. Thus, its easy association with
“terrorism” and representation as “terrorist.”

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 32 ISJ 1:1(2012)

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