This keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Salman Sayyid (University of Leeds) in June 2021 as part of the major international online conference "The Study of Islam and Muslims in the shadow of the “War on Terror”: Complexity, Reflexivity and Decolonising Methodologies". Professor Sayyid is introduced by Professor Rowena Arshad,Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh.

The conference was delivered by the Alwaleed Centre, Moray House School of Education and Sport, RACE.ed and the Centre for Education for Racial Equality Scotland - all at the University of Edinburgh. For the full programme, click HERE.

Abstract:

How should we think about decolonizing the study of Islam and Muslims? To a certain extent, some people in the field have been thinking about or against this topic for many decades, usually under the rubric of Orientalism – both its critique and its defence. Side-stepping the rear-guard actions that hold on to Orientalism (with its devotion to antediluvian positivism), it would seem that decolonizing the curriculum of Islamic studies could be achieved through a series of methodological injunctions, for example: broadening reading lists, recovering authentic subaltern voices, reversing the gaze, and recognizing the colonial inheritance. Such measures, it is argued, would undo the hierarchies that produce contemporary academic knowledge, and in many ways, are both commendable and necessary. Who would not want a kinder, gentler, fairer academy? But could these and similar measures really decolonize the study of Islam?

Islam has come to nominate a particular space and a destiny that cannot in the current conjuncture be easily set apart from the constitution of the contemporary world order, that is, the assemblages of institutions, protocols and subjectivities that connect a complex array of temporal and spatial horizons). Therefore, to decolonize the study of Islam requires a deeper decolonization than hitherto on offer. It necessitates the rejection of efforts to recuperate decolonial epistemologies and their sublimation into prevailing (neo-) liberal logics. To decolonize the study of Islam means not an extension of decoloniality but a transformation of its theoretical critique; it means addressing the place of Islam in the societies, cultures and politics that are folded within the colonial matrix of power.

The decolonial challenge is to understand the Islamicate (as the production of the post-Prophetic venture of Islam) neither as a type of colonialism nor as an abject subject of colonial power, but rather as an alternative history of the present. The project of Critical Muslim Studies takes up this challenge by focusing its investigations on how Muslimness is disclosed in a world in which Islam is rendered a scandal.