Join us for the Islamophobia Beyond Borders Workshop, in The Sir Duncan Rice Library, to discuss the international context, repercussions, and consequences of modern Islamophobia. Hosted by Professor Nadia Kiwan of the University of Aberdeen and Dr Jim Wolfreys of King's College London, inviting a host of prominent academics and civil society stakeholders to discuss and share.
Nasar Meer, University of Glasgow, UK: ‘Islam, Modernity and ‘what went wrong’ in Hegel, Weber and Gellner’
The relationship between Islam and modernity continues to rely upon an underlying frame in which Christianity is a secularised reference point for European advance. Hegel, Weber and Gellner are in particular three very different proponents of the view that formative periods of Islam locate it ‘in a mould from which it cannot escape’ (Zubaida, 1995: 153). The tempting step therefore is to reverse the telescope and re-read the colonial modern through long standing intellectual developments within Islamic thought, and specifically the endogenous forms of thinking that relocate the dynamic within the purview of Muslim scholarship. I will argue that while this is a necessary move, it is also one that invites its own intellectual hazards, and raises particular challenges for the Sociology of Religion in particular.
S. Sayyid, University of Leeds, UK: ‘Europeanness and the Last Human’
Methodological nationalism interdicts attempts to understand Islamophobia. It does this by mapping social relations onto nation-state boundaries, thereby reducing societies to nations. Islamophobia has been identified as a transnational phenomenon since at least 2008, but methodologies that take nations as containers of social phenomena continue to hinder any insights from global perspectives. This brings with it a range of conceptual investments, as the nation-state is not only a socio-economic object but also an epistemological project. Methodological nationalism is a marker of existing and aspiring nation-states, flags, and football teams. The dominance of methodological nationalism in social sciences owes much to the collapse of historical materialism, which once aimed to relativise what used to be called "bourgeois science.” The remnants of Marxist-inspired analytics can still be found in the field of Islamophobia Studies, (often in decaffeinated form), where Islamophobia appears as epiphenomenal to the workings of barely examined capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Viewing Islamophobia merely as an instrument for advancing domination by covert agencies impedes understanding it beyond the surface effect of other, more fundamental processes and positions.
The critique of methodological nationalism suggests the formulation of 'connected histories' and 'connected sociologies' as alternative approaches. These formulations, however, tend to underestimate the extent of the methodological nationalism toolkit by overlooking its epistemological foundation: Europeanness. Methodological nationalism is a product of Europe's development as an episteme. It is difficult to mention Europe without invoking its constitutive outside: the Orient. In the current context, what could be more Oriental than Islam, and what could be more contentious than Islamophobia among the family of racialised governmentalities? The category of religion is as much a part of methodological nationalism as nation, government, society, culture, and language. Islamophobia, from micro-aggressions to genocide, presents not only a social and geopolitical challenge but also a theoretical challenge, for it marks the boundary of the post-Western — its calamities and possibilities.
AbdoolKarim Vakil, Kings College London, UK: 'Flatland Islamophobia'.
Why compare three national contexts when we are trying to get away from methodological nationalism? Why, how, and when they matter depends on what we are trying to do, analytically, interpretatively, politically. For the purposes of our discussions towards conceiving a network, its object and tasks, my intervention proposes three lines of consideration. First, that we proceed from some of the dimensions of Islamophobia and their levels of articulation, global, transnational and local, to the identification of contexts (and their diverse scales, territorial, virtual, discursive, organisational). Albeit that the logics of the State, the national, and the Global War on Terror preponderate, Islamophobia is scalarly always nested. Second, and relatedly, that since Islamophobia is palimpsestic, historicist, and always in translation, its logics, including the framings of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’, refer as much to the colonial, Eurocentrism and geopolitics as to the nation. Third, the remaking of the world that naming, researching, mobilising against and combating Islamophobia entails, epistemologically and politically, demands as much reflection on and mapping of network as of context.
- Venue
- The Sir Duncan Rice Library, Meeting Room 224
- Contact
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- Booking
- Online booking available