Today’s events in the Muslim world are chaotic and incoherent if we fail to account for the past two hundred years of modern history and the entanglement with colonialism. Often, Muslims are instructed to let go of the past and stop complaining about colonialism and using it as a way to explain the current state of affairs. The logic goes that colonialism has ended and the Muslim world has been independent for the last 40-60 years, thus should take responsibility for its own affairs and failures rather than blame it on colonialism.
Such an argument also gives credence to the orientalist trope that postulates the inherent inferiority of the Muslim world and the inability to deal with its problems. The thesis is centered on the assumptions that colonialism has ended with the withdrawal of colonial troops and the achievement of independence across all parts of the Muslim world except Palestine and Kashmir (before the invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians and Americans and Iraq). This assumption hinges on a very rudimentary and ignorant understanding of colonialism and its multi-layered approach to control and domination. The military component is a small part of a larger and complex epistemic structure whose intent is to achieve total control and domination with and without the presence of boots on the ground.
The crudest control structures are those utilizing physical chains that force the physical form to confinement of space and movement. However, the most sophisticated structures operate on the mental level and attempt to achieve total domination over the mind and the intellectual capacity to conceptualize the self and its agency in the world. In this structure, the control is over the mental abilities to conceptualize and draw mental maps of the world and the solution to its multi-faceted problems. The extent of colonial success can be measured by the level of mental adherence to the colonial structure in the colonized population and its intellectual production that continue to replicate its internalized domination.
Thus, one way to rationalize the colonization becomes a very simple equation that you are colonized because you are inferior and susceptible to external domination and control. Such a view assigns responsibility to the victim and colonization is rationalized in a Darwinian type of structure and the survival of the fittest. Furthermore, the argument only examines the outer form and visible outcomes rather than paying attention to the over-all structures that made it possible for the colonial project to register successes and to be transmitted over generations. Even when states advance in a material levels they are still structurally subject to colonial discourse since the success measures are subject to a colonial typography and not outside of it.
A second of rationalization maybe located in a theological/religious debate that offers Islam’s backwardness as the reason or cause of colonial domination and control. This produces the colonial call for an Islamic reform epistemic that can/may transform Islam into an ‘enlightened’ modernity that is informed and measured by a colonial yardstick. To be modern and reformist is to accept Islam’s inherent inferiority as set per colonial discourses and then embark on a colonized reform mode that answers all the questions that are not asked by Muslims in the first place.
