Beyond Islamophobia and Islamophilia as Western Epistemic Racisms: Revisiting Runnymede Trust&apos;s Definition in a World-History Context

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, null

doi:10.13169/islastudj.1.1.0054

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Islamophobia Studies Journal

Volume 1, Issue 1

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Beyond Islamophobia and Islamophilia as Western Epistemic Racisms: Revisiting Runnymede Trust's Definition in a World-History Context

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Author(s): Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Publication date (Print): Spring 2012

Journal: Islamophobia Studies Journal

Publisher: Pluto Journals

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Abstract

The media have become obsessed with something called “Islam,” which in their voguish lexicon has acquired only two meanings, both of them unacceptable and impoverishing. On the one hand, “Islam” represents the threat of a resurgent atavism, which suggests not only the menace of a return to the Middle Ages but the destruction of what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls the democratic order in the Western world. On the other hand, “Islam” is made to stand for a defensive counterresponse to this first image of Islam as threat, especially when, for geopolitical reasons, “good” Moslems like the Saudi Arabians or the Afghan Moslem “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union are in question. … But rejection alone does not take one very far, since if we are to claim, as we must, that as a religion and as a civilization Islam does have a meaning very much beyond either of the two currently given it, we must first be able to provide something in the way of a space in which to speak of Islam. Those who wish either to rebut the standard anti-Islamic and anti-Arab rhetoric that dominates the media and liberal intellectual discourse, or to avoid the idealization of Islam (to say nothing of its sentimentalization), find themselves with scarcely a place to stand on, much less a place in which to move freely. (Said, 1980:488)

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Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169

Journal ID (publisher-id): islastudj

Title: Islamophobia Studies Journal

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 23258381

ISSN (Electronic): 2325839X

Publication date (Print): Spring 2012

Volume: 1

Issue: 1

Pages: 54-81

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University of Massachusetts, Boston

Article

Publisher ID: islastudj.1.1.0054

DOI: 10.13169/islastudj.1.1.0054

SO-VID: 2798e8d3-99b6-463e-b11c-c17c2d62e4e0

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References

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Bazian, Hatem. 2007. “Deconstructing Islamophobia: Constructing the Other.” Faultlines: News and Notes from the Center for Race and Gender . Fall. Pages 12, 14.
Boatcã, Manuela. 2006. “No Race to the Swift: Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):91–104.
Dussel, Enrique. 1994. 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro. Hacia el origen del “mito de la modernidad.” La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores.
Dussel, Enrique. 2002. “World-System and “Trans”-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3(2):221.
Dussel, Enrique. 2004. “Deconstruction of the Concept of “Tolerance”: From Intolerance to Solidarity.” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 11(3):326–333.
Grosfoguel, Ramón and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, eds. 2002. The Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge . Greenwood Publishing Group.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2006. “World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” REVIEW XXIX(2):167–87.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3/March-May):211–223.
Grosfoguel, Ramón and Eric Mielants. 2006. “The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):1–12.
Grosfoguel, Ramón (guest co-editor), Eric Mielants (guest co-editor), Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (journal editor). 2006. “Othering Islam: Proceedings of the International Conference on “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Islamophobia” (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, France, June 2–3, 2006).” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V(1).
Hopkins, Terence K., Immanuel Wallerstein, and associates. 1982. World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology . Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2004. “The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge.” City 8(1):29–56.
Maldonaldo-Torres, Nelson. 2006. “Reconciliation as a Contested Future: Decolonization as Project or Beyond the Paradigm of War.” In Reconciliation: Nations and Churches in Latin America . Edited by Iain S. Maclean. London: Ashgate.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Border Thinking and Subaltern Knowledge . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2006. “Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re)Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):13–28.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. “From Central Asia to the Caucasus and Anatolia: transcultural subjectivity and de-colonial thinking.” Postcolonial Studies 10(1):111–120.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition . New York: HarperOne (A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers).
Noor, Farish A. 2006. “How Washington's ‘War on Terror’ Became Everyone's: Islamophobia and the Impact of September 11 on the Political Terrain of South and Southeast Asia.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):29–50.
Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15(2):215–232.
Reifer, Thomas Ehrlich. 2006. “Militarization, Globalization, and Islamist Social Movements: How Today's Ideology of Islamophobia Fuels Militant Islam.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):51–72.
Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism . New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward W. 1980. “Islam Through Western Eyes.” Nation 230(16):488–492.
Sajid, Abduijalil. 2005. “Islamophobia: A New Word for an Old Fear.” Palestine - Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 12(2):31–40.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994 [1988]. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Pp. 66–111 in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory , edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2001. “Open the Antisystemic Movements: The Book, the Concept, and the Reality.” Review , XXIV, 2, summer, 299–336.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad-Hossein. 2002. “Mysticism and Utopia: Towards the Sociology of Self-Knowledge and Human Architecture (A Study in Marx, Gurdjieff, and Mannheim).” Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad-Hossein. 2002-. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN 1540-5699).
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2005. “Orientalist and Liberating Discourses of East-West Difference: Revisiting Edward Said and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Discourse of Sociological Practice , Vol. 7, Issues 1&2, Spring/ Fall, 187–201.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2006a. “Editor's Note: Probing Islamophobia.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):VII–XI.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2006b. “Toward a Dialectical Conception of Imperiality: The Transitory (Heuristic) Nature of the Primacy of Analyses of Economies in World-Historical Social Science.” Review (Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center), XXIX, 4, 291–328.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2007a. “Abu Ghraib as a Microcosm: The Strange Face of Empire as a Lived Prison.” Sociological Spectrum , 27: 29–55.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2007b. Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism . Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2008. “From Utopistics to Utopystics: Integrative Reflections on Potential Contributions of Mysticism to World-Systems Analyses and Praxes of Historical Alternatives.” Pp. 202–219 In Islam and the Orientalist World-System , co-edited by Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zo'by. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. Forthcoming. “‘I Change Myself, I Change the World’: Anzaldúa's Sociological Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” Humanity and Society .
Tayob, Abdulkader. 2006. “Muslim Responses to Integration Demands in the Netherlands since 9/11.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):73–90.
Tlostanova, Madina. 2006. “Life in Samarkand: Caucasus and Central Asia vis-à-vis Russia, the West, and Islam.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):105–116.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy . Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: aunt lute books.

[2] Bazian, Hatem. 2007. “Deconstructing Islamophobia: Constructing the Other.” Faultlines: News and Notes from the Center for Race and Gender . Fall. Pages 12, 14.

[3] Boatcã, Manuela. 2006. “No Race to the Swift: Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):91–104.

[4] Dussel, Enrique. 1994. 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro. Hacia el origen del “mito de la modernidad.” La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores.

[5] Dussel, Enrique. 2002. “World-System and “Trans”-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3(2):221.

[6] Dussel, Enrique. 2004. “Deconstruction of the Concept of “Tolerance”: From Intolerance to Solidarity.” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 11(3):326–333.

[7] Grosfoguel, Ramón and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, eds. 2002. The Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge . Greenwood Publishing Group.

[8] Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2006. “World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” REVIEW XXIX(2):167–87.

[9] Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3/March-May):211–223.

[10] Grosfoguel, Ramón and Eric Mielants. 2006. “The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):1–12.

[11] Grosfoguel, Ramón (guest co-editor), Eric Mielants (guest co-editor), Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (journal editor). 2006. “Othering Islam: Proceedings of the International Conference on “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Islamophobia” (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, France, June 2–3, 2006).” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V(1).

[12] Hopkins, Terence K., Immanuel Wallerstein, and associates. 1982. World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology . Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

[13] Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2004. “The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge.” City 8(1):29–56.

[14] Maldonaldo-Torres, Nelson. 2006. “Reconciliation as a Contested Future: Decolonization as Project or Beyond the Paradigm of War.” In Reconciliation: Nations and Churches in Latin America . Edited by Iain S. Maclean. London: Ashgate.

[15] Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Border Thinking and Subaltern Knowledge . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[16] Mignolo, Walter D. 2006. “Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re)Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):13–28.

[17] Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. “From Central Asia to the Caucasus and Anatolia: transcultural subjectivity and de-colonial thinking.” Postcolonial Studies 10(1):111–120.

[18] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition . New York: HarperOne (A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers).

[19] Noor, Farish A. 2006. “How Washington's ‘War on Terror’ Became Everyone's: Islamophobia and the Impact of September 11 on the Political Terrain of South and Southeast Asia.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):29–50.

[20] Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15(2):215–232.

[21] Reifer, Thomas Ehrlich. 2006. “Militarization, Globalization, and Islamist Social Movements: How Today's Ideology of Islamophobia Fuels Militant Islam.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):51–72.

[22] Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism . New York: Vintage Books.

[23] Said, Edward W. 1980. “Islam Through Western Eyes.” Nation 230(16):488–492.

[24] Sajid, Abduijalil. 2005. “Islamophobia: A New Word for an Old Fear.” Palestine - Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 12(2):31–40.

[25] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994 [1988]. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Pp. 66–111 in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory , edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press.

[26] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2001. “Open the Antisystemic Movements: The Book, the Concept, and the Reality.” Review , XXIV, 2, summer, 299–336.

[27] Tamdgidi, Mohammad-Hossein. 2002. “Mysticism and Utopia: Towards the Sociology of Self-Knowledge and Human Architecture (A Study in Marx, Gurdjieff, and Mannheim).” Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton.

[28] Tamdgidi, Mohammad-Hossein. 2002-. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN 1540-5699).

[29] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2005. “Orientalist and Liberating Discourses of East-West Difference: Revisiting Edward Said and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Discourse of Sociological Practice , Vol. 7, Issues 1&2, Spring/ Fall, 187–201.

[30] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2006a. “Editor's Note: Probing Islamophobia.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):VII–XI.

[31] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2006b. “Toward a Dialectical Conception of Imperiality: The Transitory (Heuristic) Nature of the Primacy of Analyses of Economies in World-Historical Social Science.” Review (Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center), XXIX, 4, 291–328.

[32] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2007a. “Abu Ghraib as a Microcosm: The Strange Face of Empire as a Lived Prison.” Sociological Spectrum , 27: 29–55.

[33] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2007b. Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism . Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.

[34] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2008. “From Utopistics to Utopystics: Integrative Reflections on Potential Contributions of Mysticism to World-Systems Analyses and Praxes of Historical Alternatives.” Pp. 202–219 In Islam and the Orientalist World-System , co-edited by Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zo'by. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

[35] Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. Forthcoming. “‘I Change Myself, I Change the World’: Anzaldúa's Sociological Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” Humanity and Society .

[36] Tayob, Abdulkader. 2006. “Muslim Responses to Integration Demands in the Netherlands since 9/11.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):73–90.

[37] Tlostanova, Madina. 2006. “Life in Samarkand: Caucasus and Central Asia vis-à-vis Russia, the West, and Islam.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1):105–116.

[38] Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy . Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.