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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE
Journal of the Sociology of Self-
A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)
This paper is about the way epistemicracism shapes contemporary discussionson Islamophobia. The first part is a discus-sion about epistemic racism in the world-system. The second part is on the Westernmale hegemonic identity politics and thefundamentalist responses to it. The thirdpart is on epistemic Islamophobia and thesocial sciences.
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Epistemic racism and epistemic sexismare the most hidden forms of racism andsexism in the global system we all inhabit,the “Westernized/Christianized modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-sys-tem” (see Grosfoguel 2008a). Social, politi-cal, and economic racisms and sexisms aremuch more visible and recognized todaythan epistemological racism/sexism. How-ever, epistemic racism is the foundational
form and older version of racism in that theinferiority of “non-Western” people asbelow the human (non-humans or sub-humans) is defined on their closeness toanimality and the latter is defined on thebasis of their inferior intelligence and, thus,lack of rationality. Epistemic racism oper-ates through the privileging of an essential-ist (“identity”) politics of “Western” maleelites, that is, the hegemonic tradition ofthought of Western philosophy and socialtheory that almost never includes “West-ern” Women and never includes “non-Western” philosophers/philosophies andsocial scientists. In this tradition, the“West” is considered to be the only legiti-mate tradition of thought able to produceknowledge 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 isentangled with epistemic sexism, Western-
Ramón Grosfoguel is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and aSenior Research Associate of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He has published many articles andbooks on the political economy of the world-system and on Caribbean migrations to Western Europe and theUnited States.
Epistemic Islamophobia and
Colonial Social Sciences
Ramón Grosfoguel
University of California, Berkeley • Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Abstract: This article explores how epistemic racism shapes contemporary discussions onIslamophobia. Epistemic Racism is an underestimated aspect of racism. The first part is adiscussion about epistemic racism in the world-system. The second part is on the Western malehegemonic identity politics and the fundamentalist responses to it. The third part is on epistemicIslamophobia and the social sciences.
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centric social science is a form of epistemicracism/sexism that privilege “Western”male’s knowledge as the superior knowl-edge in the world today.
If we take the canon of thinkers privi-leged within Western academic disciplines,we can observe that without exception theyprivilege “Western” male thinkers and the-ories, above all those of European andEuro-North-American males. This hege-monic essentialist “identity politics” is sopowerful and so normalized—through thediscourse of “objectivity” and “neutrality”of the Cartesian “ego-politics of knowl-edge” in the social sciences—that it hideswho speaks and from which power loca-tion they speak from, such that when wethink of “identity politics” we immediatelyassume, as if by “common sense,” that weare talking about racialized minorities. Infact, without denying the existence ofessentialist “identity politics” amongracialized minorities, the hegemonic “iden-tity politics”—that of Eurocentric male dis-course—uses this identitarian, racist, sexistdiscourse to discard all critical interven-tions rooted in epistemologies and cosmol-ogies coming from oppressed groups and“non-Western” traditions of thought (Mal-donado-Torres 2008). The underlying mythof the Westernized academy is still the sci-entificist discourse of “objectivity” and“neutrality” which hides the “locus ofenunciation” of the speaker, that is, whospeaks and from what epistemic body-pol-itics of knowledge and geopolitics ofknowledge they speak from in the existingpower relations at a world-scale. Throughthe myth of the “ego-politics of knowl-edge” (which in reality always speaksthrough a “Western” male body and aEurocentric geopolitics of knowledge) criti-cal voices coming from individuals andgroups inferiorized and subalternized bythis hegemonic epistemic racism andepistemic sexism are denied and discardedas particularistic. If epistemology hascolor—as African philosopher Emmanuel
Chukwudi Eze (1997) points out so well—and has gender/color—as African-Ameri-can Sociologist Patricia Hills Collins (1991)has argued—then the Eurocentric episte-mology that dominates the social scienceshas both color and gender. The construc-tion of the epistemology of “Western”males as superior and the rest of the worldas inferior forms an inherent part of theepistemological racism/sexism which hasprevailed in the world-system for morethan 500 years.
The epistemic privilege of the “West”was consecrated and normalized throughthe Spanish Catholic monarchy’s destruc-tion of Al-Andalus and the European colo-nial expansion since the late 15
th
century.From renaming the world with Christiancosmology (Europe, Africa, Asia, and later,America) and characterizing all non-Chris-tian knowledge as a product of pagan anddevil forces, to assuming in their own Euro-centric provincialism that it is only withinthe Greco-Roman tradition, passingthrough the Renaissance, the Enlighten-ment, and Western sciences that “truth”and “universal i ty” is achieved, theepistemic privilege of Western, Eurocentric,male “identity politics” was normalized tothe point of invisibility as a hegemonic“identity politics.” It became the universalnormalized knowledge. In this way, all“other” traditions of thought were deemedinferior (characterized in the 16
th
centuryas “barbarians,” in the 19
th
century as“primitives,” in the 20
th
century as “under-developed,” and at the beginning of the 21
st
century as “anti-democratic”). Hence,since the formation of Western LiberalSocial Sciences in the 19
th
century, bothepistemic racism and epistemic sexismhave been constitutive of its disciplinesand knowledge production. Westernsocial sciences assume the inferiority,partiality, and the lack of objectivity in itsknowledge-production of “non-Western”knowledge and the superiority of the“West.” As a result, Western social theory is
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based on the experience of 5 countries(France, England, Germany, Italy and theUnited States) that makes only less than 12percent of the world population. The pro-vincialism of Western Social Science socialtheory with false claims to universality,pretends to account for the social experi-ence of the other 88 percent of the worldpopulation. In sum, Eurocentrism with itsepistemic racism/sexism is a form of pro-vincialism that is reproduced inside thesocial sciences today.
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Against this hegemonic “identity poli-tics” that always privileged Christian andWestern beauty, knowledge, traditions,spiritualities, and cosmologies while deem-ing as inferior and subaltern the non-Chris-tian and non-Western beauty, knowledge,traditions, spiritualities, and cosmologies,those subjects rendered inferior and subal-tern by these hegemonic discourses devel-oped their own “identity politics” as a reac-tion to the racism of the former. This pro-cess is necessary as part of a process of self-valorization in a racist world that rendersthem inferior and disqualifies their human-ity. However, this process of identitarianaffirmation has its limits if it leads to funda-mentalist proposals that invert the binaryterms of the hegemonic “Western” MalesEurocentric racist and sexist philosophicaltradition of thought. For example, if it isassumed that subaltern non-Western eth-nic/racial groups are superior and that thedominant Western racial/ethnic groups areinferior, they are merely inverting the termsof hegemonic Western racism withoutovercoming its fundamental problem, thatis, the racism that renders some humanbeings inferior and the elevation of othersto the category of superior on cultural orbiological grounds (Grosfoguel 2003).Another example is that of accepting—as
do some Islamic and Afrocentric funda-mentalists—the hegemonic Eurocentricfundamentalist discourses that the Euro-pean tradition is the only one that is natu-rally and inherently democratic, whereasthe non-European “others” are presumedto be naturally and inherently authoritar-ian, denying democratic discourses andforms of institutional democracy to thenon-Western world (which are, of course,distinct from Western liberal democracy),and as a result, supporting political author-itarianism. This is what all Third Worldfundamentalists do when they accept theEurocentric fundamentalist false premisethat the only democratic tradition is theWestern one, and, therefore, assume thatdemocracy does not apply to their “cul-ture” and their “societies,” defendingmonarchical, authoritarian and/or dictato-rial forms of political authority. This merelyreproduces an inverted form of Eurocentricessentialism. The idea that “democracy” isinherently “Western” and that “non-demo-cratic” forms are inherently “non-Western”is shared both by Eurocentric fundamental-ist discourses and its varieties such as“Third Worldist” fundamentalisms.
The “divisions” that results from theseidentity politics ends up reproducing in aninverted form the same essentialism andfundamentalism of the hegemonic Euro-centric discourse. If we define fundamen-talism as those perspectives that assumestheir own cosmology and epistemology tobe superior and as the only source of truth,inferiorizing and denying equality to otherepistemologies and cosmologies, thenEurocentrism is not merely a form of fun-damentalism but the hegemonic funda-mentalism in the world today. Those ThirdWorldist fundamentalisms (Afrocentric,Islamist, Indigenist, etc.) that emerge inresponse to the hegemonic Eurocentric fun-damentalism and that the “Western” pressput in the front pages of newspapers every-day are subordinated forms of Eurocentricfundamentalism insofar as they reproduce
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and leave intact the binary, essentialist,racial hierarchies of Eurocentric fundamen-talism (Grosfoguel 2009).
In sum, a political consequence of thisepistemological discussion is that a founda-tional basis on contemporary discussionson political Islam, on democracy and on theso-called “War on Terrorism” is “epistemicracism.” “Western” epistemic racism byinferiorizing “non-Western” epistemolo-gies and cosmologies and by privileging“Western” epistemology as the superiorform of knowledge and as the only sourceto define human rights, democracy, citizen-ship, etc. ends up disqualifying the “non-West” as unable to produce democracy, jus-tice, human rights, scientific knowledge,etc. This is grounded in the essentialist ideathat reason and philosophy lies in the“West” while non-rational thinking lies inthe “rest.”
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Epistemic racism in the form ofepistemic Islamophobia is a foundationaland constitutive logic of the modern/colo-nial world and of its legitimate forms ofknowledge production. European human-ists and scholars since the 16
th
century haveargued that Islamic knowledge is inferiorto the West. The debate about Moriscos in16
th
century Spain were full of epistemicIslamophobic conceptions (Perceval 1992;1997). After the expulsion of Moriscos inthe early 17
th
century, the inferiorization of“Moros” continued under an epistemicIslamophobic discourse. Influential Euro-pean thinkers in the 19
th
century such as,for example, Ernst Renan “… argued thatIslam was incompatible with science andphilosophy” (Ernst 2003: 20-21).
Similarly, in social sciences we haveconcrete manifestations of epistemic Isla-mophobia in the work of classical socialtheories of Western-centric patriarchal
social science such as Karl Marx and MaxWeber. As Sukidi states:
Islam, according to Weber, was thepolar opposite of Calvinism. Therewas no double edge to predestina-tion in Islam. Instead, as Weberstated in Protestant Ethic (ch. 4, n.36), Islam contains a belief in prede-termination, not in predestination,which concerned the fate of Mus-lims in this world, not the next(ibid., p. 185). The doctrine of pre-destination maintained by the Cal-vinists, which led them to workhard as a duty (vocation, calling), isnot evident among Muslims. Infact, as Weber argued, ‘the mostimportant thing, the proof of thebeliever in predestination, playedno part in Islam’ (ibid.). Withoutthe concept of predestination, Islamcould not provide believers with apositive attitude to this-worldlyactivity. As a consequence, Mus-lims are condemned to fatalism. (p.197)
The rationalizations of doctrine andconduct of life were alien to Islam.Weber used the belief in predestina-tion as the key concept to explainthe rationalization of doctrine andthe conduct of life. In Calvinism,the belief in predestination couldcertainly generate an ethical rigor,legalism, and rational conduct inthis-worldly activity. None of thesethings was present in Islam (p. 199).Accordingly, the Islamic belief inpredestination did not lead towardrationalization of doctrine and theconduct of life. In fact, it turnedMuslims into irrational fatalists.‘Islam,’ in Weber’s view, ‘wasdiverted completely from anyreally rational conduct of life by theadvent of the cult of saints, and
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finally by magic’ (Sukidi 2006: 200).
If we follow the logic of Weber to itsfinal consequences, that is, that Muslimsare irrational and fatalistic people, then noserious knowledge can come from them.What are the geopolitics of knowledgeinvolved in Weber ’s epistemic racismabout Muslim people? The geopolitics ofknowledge is the German and French ori-entalists’ epistemic Islamophobia that isrepeated in Weber’s verdict about Islam.For Weber, it is only the Christian traditionthat gives rise to economic rationalism and,thus, to Western modern capitalism. Islamcannot compare to the “superiority” ofWestern values in that it lacks individuality,rationality and science. Rational scienceand, its derivative, rational technology are,according to Weber, unknown to orientalcivilizations. These statements are quiteproblematic. Scholars such as Saliba (2007)and Graham (2006) have demonstrated theinfluence of scientific developments in theIslamic World on the West, modern scienceand modern philosophy. Rationality was acentral tenet of the Islamic civilization.While Europe was in obscurantist feudalsuperstition during what is known as theMiddle Ages, the school of Baghdad wasthe world center of intellectual and scien-tific production and creativity. Weber’s andWeberians’ Orientalist views of Islamreproduce an epistemic Islamophobiawhere Muslims are incapable of producingscience and of having rationality, despitethe historical evidence.
But the same problem of epistemic Isla-mophobia we find in Marx and Engels.Although Marx spent two months in Alg-iers in 1882 recovering from a sickness, hewrote almost nothing on Islam. However,Marx had an orientalist epistemic racistview of non-Western peoples in general ofwhich he did write extensively (Moore1977). Moreover, his close collaborator, Fre-derick Engels, did write about Muslim peo-ple and repeated the same racist stereo-
types that Marx used against “Oriental”people. Talking about French colonizationof Algeria, Engels said:
Upon the whole it is, in our opin-ion, very fortunate that the Arabianchief has been taken. The struggleof the Bedouins was a hopeless one,and though the manner in whichbrutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, havecarried on the war is highly blam-able, the conquest of Algeria is animportant and fortunate fact for theprogress of civilization. The pira-cies of the Barbaresque states, neverinterfered with by the English gov-ernment as long as they did not dis-turb their ships, could not be putdown but by the conquest of one ofthese states. And the conquest ofAlgeria has already forced the Beysof Tunis and Tripoli, and even theEmperor of Morocco, to enter uponthe road of civilization. They wereobliged to find other employmentfor their people than piracy… Andif we may regret that the liberty ofthe Bedouins of the desert has beendestroyed, we must not forget thatthese same Bedouins were a nationof robbers—whose principal meansof living consisted of making excur-sions either upon each other, orupon the settled villagers, takingwhat they found, slaughtering allthose who resisted, and selling theremaining prisoners as slaves. Allthese nations of free barbarianslook very proud, noble and glori-ous at a distance, but only comenear them and you will find thatthey, as well as the more civilizednations, are ruled by the lust ofgain, and only employ ruder andmore cruel means. And after all, themodern bourgeois, with civiliza-tion, industry, order, and at leastrelative enlightenment following
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him, is preferable to the feudalmarauding robber, with the barbar-ian state of society to which theybelong. (Engels, French Rule inAlgiers,
The Northern Star
, January22, 1848, in: MECW, Vol.6, pp.469-472; quoted in S. Avineri (1968),
Karl Marx on Colonialism and Mod-ernization
(Doubleday: New York,p. 43)
Engels’s option is quite clear: to sup-port colonial expansion and bring WesternCivilization even if it is bourgeois and bru-tal in order to overcome a “barbarian” stateof affairs. The superiority of the “West overthe rest” and, in particular, over Muslims isquite clear in this statement. Talking aboutIndia, the irrational fanaticism of Muslimsis expressed in the following quote ofEngels:
The insurgent warfare now beginsto take the character of theBedouins of Algeria against theFrench; with the difference that theHindoos are far from being sofanatical, and that they are not anation of horsemen. (Engels:
NewYork Daily Tribune
, July 21, 1858,MECW, Vol.15, p. 583)
If there is any doubt about Marx’sshared views with Engels’s on the inferior-ity of Muslims and “non-Western” peoplerelative to the West, the following quote is aconfirmation:
… The question … is not whetherthe English had a right to conquerIndia, but whether we are to preferIndia conquered by the Turk, by thePersian, by the Russian, to Indiaconquered by the Briton. Englandhas to fulfill a double mission inIndia: one destructive, the otherregenerating—the annihilation ofold Asiatic society, and the laying of
the material foundations of West-ern society in Asia. Arabs, Turks,Tartars, Moguls, who had succes-sively overrun India, soon becameHinduized, the barbarian conquer-ors being, by an eternal law of his-tory, conquered themselves by thesuperior civilization of their sub-jects. The British were the first con-querors superior, and, therefore,inaccessible to Hindu civilization…The day is not far distant when by acombination of railways and steamvessel, the distance betweenEngland and India, measured bytime, will be shortened to eightdays, and when that once fabulouscountry will thus be actuallyannexed to the Western World ….(Marx, “The Future Results of theBritish Rule in India” written onJuly 22, 1853, in
Marx and Engels OnColonialism
, page 81-83…)
Marx did not have much hope in theproletarian spirit of the Muslim masseswhen he stated in relation to the OttomanEmpire’s expansion to Eastern Europeanterritories the following:
The principal power of the Turkishpopulation in Europe, indepen-dently of the reserve always readyto be drawn from Asia, lies in themob of Constantinople [Istanbul]and a few other large towns. It isessentially Turkish, and although itfinds its principal livelihood bydoing jobs for Christian capitalists,it maintains with great jealousy theimaginary superiority and realimpunity for excesses which theprivileges of Islam confer it as com-pared with Christians. It is wellknown that this mob in everyimportant coup d’etat has to bewon over by bribes and flattery. It isthis mob alone, with the exception
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of a few colonized districts, whichoffers a compact and imposingmass of Turkish population inEurope. Certainly there will be,sooner or later, an absolute neces-sity for freeing one of the finestparts of this continent from the ruleof a mob, compared with which themob of Imperial Rome was anassemblage of sages and heroes.(“Turkey,” New York Daily Tribune,April 7, 1853, written by Engels atMarx’s request, quoted in S. Avineri(1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism andModernization (Doubleday: NewYork, p. 54)
For Marx, similar to Weber, Muslimpeople from Turkish origin are a mob ofignorant people that made the mobs of theRoman Empire look like sages. He calledfor a struggle of liberation against the Mus-lim mobs. Accordingly, for Marx, Westerncivilization is superior and, thus, called tocivilized the non-Western Muslims. In hisperspective, better is the Western colonialexpansion rather than leaving intact in atimeless stage a barbarian inferior people.
Marx distrusted Muslim people andwas convinced of the inherently xenopho-bic traits in Islam and, thus, wrote apolo-getically about Western colonialism. Marxsaid:
As the Koran treats all foreigners asfoes, nobody will dare to presenthimself in a Mussulman countrywithout having taken his precau-tions. The first European mer-chants, therefore, who risked thechances of commerce with such apeople, contrived to secure them-selves an exceptional treatment andprivileges originally personal, butafterwards extended to their wholenation. Hence the origin of capitu-lations. (“The Outbreak of theCrimean War—Moslems, Chris-
tians and Jews in the OttomanEmpire,” New York Daily Tribune,April 15, 1854, quoted in S. Avineri(1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism andModernization (Doubleday: NewYork, p. 146)
Marx said, repeating the typicalepistemic racism of the orientalist vision ofhis time, that:
The Koran and the Mussulman leg-islation emanating from it reducethe geography and ethnography ofthe various peoples to the simpleconvenient distinction of twonations and of two countries; thoseof the Faithful and of the Infidels.The Infidel is “harby,” i.e. theenemy. Islamism proscribes thenation to the Infidels, constituting astate of permanent hostilitybetween the Mussulman and theunbeliever. (“The Outbreak of theCrimean War—Moslems, Chris-tians and Jews in the OttomanEmpire,” New York Daily Tribune,April 15, 1854, quoted in S. Avineri(1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism andModernization (Doubleday: NewYork, p. 144)
These simplified, essentialist andreductionist views of Islam from a Judeo/Christian-centric, Western-centric perspec-tive was part of the Orientalists’ epistemicracism and condescending paternalismtowards Islamic thought of which Marxwas no exception.
Marx believed that secularism was fun-damental for revolution to have a chance inMuslim lands. He said:
…if you abolish their subjectionunder the Koran, by a civil emanci-pation, you cancel at the same timetheir subjection to the clergy, andprovoke a revolution in their social,
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political and religious relations….If you supplant the Koran by a codecivil, you must Occidentalize theentire structure of Byzantine soci-ety. (“The Outbreak of the CrimeanWar—Moslems, Christians andJews in the Ottoman Empire,” NewYork Daily Tribune, April 15, 1854,quoted in S. Avineri (1968), KarlMarx on Colonialism and Moderniza-tion (Doubleday: New York, p. 146)
This secularist view of Marx was a typ-ical colonial strategy promoted by theWestern Empires in order to destroy theways of thinking and living of the colonialsubjects and, thus, impede any trace ofresistance. By arguing that Muslim peopleare subjected to the rule of a “religion,”Marx projected in Islam the cosmology ofthe secularized Western-centric, Christian-centric view. Islam does not consider itselfa “religion” in the Westernized, Christian-ized sense of a sphere separated from poli-tics, economics, etc. Islam is more a cosmol-ogy that follows the notion of “Tawhid”which is a doctrine of unity, a holistic worldview, that the Eurocentric Cartesian mod-ern/colonial world view destroyed in theWest and with its colonial expansionattempted to destroy in the rest of theworld as well. The practice of colonialChristianization in the early modern/colo-nial period and secularism after the later18th century colonial expansion was part ofthe “epistemicide” and “religiouscide,”that is, the extermination of non-Westernspirituality and ways of knowledge imple-mented by Western colonial expansion.Epistemicide and “religiouscide” madepossible the colonization of the minds/bodies of colonial subjects.
If Marx and Weber are social sciences’classical theorists, Western social sciencesare informed by epistemic Eurocentric andIslamophobic prejudices. To decolonize theWestern social sciences, it would entailmany important processes that we cannot
spell out here in detail. But one of themwould be to expand the canon of social the-ory to incorporate as a central componentthe contributions of decolonial Europeanand non-European social theorists such asBoaventura de Sousa Santos, SalmanSayyid, Ali Shariati, Anibal Quijano, SilviaRivera Cusicanqui, W.E.B. Dubois, SilviaWynter and other social theorist thinkingfrom the underside of modernity. To incor-porate these thinkers is not a question ofmulticulturalism but of creating a more rig-orous and pluriversal (as opposed to uni-versal) decolonial social science. AliShariati in particular is an Islamic social sci-entist that produced important critiques ofWestern social theorist such as Marx.
But isn’t there only one social scienceand, thus, not different social sciences?Right now what we call social science is aparticular, provincial (Western male tradi-tion of thought) defining for the rest what issocial science and what is valid, universalknowledge. To decolonize Westernizedprovincial social sciences we need to moveinto a global inter-epistemic horizontal dia-logue among social scientists from differentepistemic traditions of thought to re-foundnew decolonial social sciences in a pluriv-ersal mode rather than the current univer-salistic mode. This is not an easy task andwe cannot go into the detail of what thisimplies in this article. However, the trans-formation from universalism towardspluriversalism in the social sciences is fun-damental for moving from the frameworkin which one defines for the rest (colonialsocial sciences) to a new paradigm wherethe production of concepts and knowledgeis the result of a truly inter-epistemic hori-zontal universal dialogue (decolonial socialsciences). This is not a call for relativism butto think of universality as pluriversality,that is, as the result of the inter-epistemicinteraction in horizontal mode rather thanthe current universalistic social sciences ofmono-epistemic imperial/colonial interac-tion with the rest of the world.
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ISLAMOPHOBIC DEBATES TODAY
The importance of this discussionabout epistemic Islamophobia is that thelatter is manifested in contemporarydebates and public policy. The epistemicracism and its derivative Eurocentric fun-damentalism in social theory are mani-fested in discussions about human rightsand democracy today. “Non-Western”epistemologies that define human rightsand human dignity in different terms thanthe West are considered inferior to “West-ern” hegemonic definitions and, thus,excluded from the global conversationabout these questions. If Islamic philoso-phy and thought are portrayed as inferiorto the West by Eurocentric thinkers andclassical social theory, then the logical con-sequence is that they have nothing to con-tribute to the question of democracy andhuman rights and should be not onlyexcluded from the global conversation, butrepressed. The underlying Western-centricview is that Muslims can be part of the dis-cussion as long as they stop thinking asMuslims and take the hegemonic Eurocen-tric liberal definition of democracy andhuman rights. Any Muslim that attempts tothink these questions from within theIslamic tradition is immediately suspiciousof fundamentalism. Islam and democracyor Islam and Human Rights are consideredin the hegemonic Eurocentric “commonsense” an oxymoron.
The incompatibility between Islam anddemocracy has as its foundation theepistemic inferiorization of the Muslimworld views. Today an art i l lery ofepistemic racist “experts” in the West talkswith authority about Islam, with no seriousknowledge of the Islamic tradition. The ste-reotypes and lies repeated over and overagain in Western press and magazines endsup, like in Goebbels’ Nazi theory of propa-ganda, being believed as truth. As EdwardSaid said not too long time ago:
A corps of experts on the Islamicworld has grown to prominence,and during a crisis they are broughtout to pontificate on formulaicideas about Islam on news pro-grams or talk shows. There alsoseems to have been a strangerevival of canonical, though previ-ously discredited, Orientalist ideasabout Muslim, generally non-white, people—ideas which haveachieved a startling prominence ata time when racial or religious mis-representations of every other cul-tural group are no longer circulatedwith such impunity. Malicious gen-eralizations about Islam havebecome the last acceptable form ofdenigration of foreign culture in theWest; what is said about Muslimmind, or character, or religion, orculture as a whole cannot now besaid in mainstream discussionabout Africans, Jews, other Orien-tals, or Asians…. My contention…is that most of this is unacceptablegeneralization of the most irrespon-sible sort, and could never be usedfor any other religious, cultural, ordemographic group on earth. Whatwe expect from the serious study ofWestern societies, with its complextheories, enormously variegatedanalyses of social structures, histo-ries, cultural formations, andsophisticated languages of investi-gation, we should also expect fromthe study and discussion of Islamicsocieties in the West. (Said 1998: xi-xvi)
The circulation of these stereotypescontributes to the portrayal of Muslims asracially inferior, violent creatures—thus, itseasy association with “terrorism” and rep-resentation as “terrorist.”
38 RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VIII, 2, FALL 2010
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