Abstract
This article begins with a discussion of the notion of ‘Islam’ as used in the post-9/11 era. Rather than assuming that there is one specific notion of religion, the author problematizes the relationship between religion and politics in the aftermath of 9/11. From the perspectives of Islamophobia studies and international relations studies, the article looks specifically at how Islam was given an agency of its own, which also created a fertile ground for reframing the religion of Islam as being not a religion, but a political ideology, thus operating, unlike other religions, primarily in the field of politics. The article discusses the theory of the clash of civilizations as presented by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington against the backdrop of succeeding policies, such as the proclamations of the War on Terror by President George Bush related to the ideological void that was left after the fall of the Soviet Union, which ultimately marked the entrance into a new era in the making of global politics. The author argues that the increasing debates about Islam following the violent attacks on 9/11 led to a religionizing of political events that subsequently dereligionized religion and depoliticized the notion of politics.
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Notes
In fact, the British orientalist Bernard Lewis had presented the “clash of civilizations” argument as early as in 1957 during a speech at Johns Hopkins University.
Decolonial thinkers such as Salman Sayyid are concerned with the attempt to give the Muslim subject a name in the world and not to leave them speechless and at the mercy of postcolonial relations, orientalist patterns of thought, and positivist epistemology. In this context, Sayyid sees Islamophobia as an attempt to prevent the Muslim subject from being given a place in the world as a Muslim (Sayyid 2014). To name this space (beyond the debate about Islamophobia in particular), the decolonial theorist Nelson Maldonado-Torres proposed a way to achieve decolonial epistemic disobedience in his ten theses, which frame the decolonial project in such a way that an individual subject will emerge as: a ‘questioner, thinker, theorist, writer, and communicator’; a creator involved in an aesthetic, erotic, and spiritual decolonial turn; an agent of social change; and, lastly, an actor in a collective (Maldonado-Torres 2016, pp. 24–28).
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Hafez, F. From politicizing and dereligionizing religion to religionizing and depoliticizing politics. Reflecting on ‘Islam’ 20 years after 9/11. Z Religion Ges Polit 7, 697–710 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41682-023-00154-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41682-023-00154-3