Covert Violence: Counting Cultural Trauma at the Intersection of ATR, Islam, and Neoliberalism in Africa

Abstract

This chapter will deal with the relationship between trauma and mental health of loss of culture and will hopefully put another nail in the coffin to the ubiquitous yet problematic question of whether or not Islam needs its equivalent of a Protestant Reformation. It focuses on the Wahhabi-Salafi movement’s puritanical and iconoclastic targeting of indigenous cultures and those culture’s concrete symbols and embodied practices across the Africa and Asia, and their Western diaspora; it also looks at austerity within more firmly Salafi-Wahhabi Muslim societies in the Middle East. The thesis claims that the pervasiveness of the Wahhabi-Salafi strain, due to the amount of self-repression it calls for, dehumanizes both those who internalize it by choice and those who have it imposed on their thinking, in a way which evokes the same culturally complex trauma that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) does. This chapter engages with the subject of Salafi-Wahhabi cultural colonialism through the lens of a similar religious movement that has a puritanical, austere, and iconoclastic birth and strand: Protestantism. This chapter is about healing one’s self and one’s communities from dominant culture and being accountable to the internalized repression which colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism in vulnerable communities bring.