Islam and the West… for a better world @
Orientalist and imperial practices, enables the division of populations along distinct lines of belonging and classification. Hence, Muslims must not be made to feel that their religion is in danger, but that is because the goal is to have – to recognize – only political enemies. War is thus negotiated first by determining the battlefield as political, and by restricting and then denying its religious dimension. Indeed, what must be prevented is precisely the awareness that what opposes France to Algeria is religious difference. What must be prevented is the religious association that could transcend local divisions, that disable organized resistance against the French conquerors.
The only common idea that can link and relate all the tribes that surround us is religion. The only common feeling upon which one could rely in order to subjugate them [and therefore lead them], is hatred against the foreigner and the infidel who came to invade their land (Tocqueville, Sur l’Algérie, 103).
Religion and politics therefore appear as strategic divisions, fighting terms, as it were, that do not only distinguish between communities but within them for military and ruling purposes. Kabyles and Arabs are thus not only distinguished on the basis of race, they are also said to belong to different realms (commerce on the one hand, religion and politics on the other). And the separation of realms, the distinction between religion and politics, further divides communities from themselves. It disables the possibility of collective action, the ability to recognize, and fight, the true enemy. The technological sophistication of colonial divisions does hark back, of course, to ancient and well-tried principles such as “divide and rule,” but like the bomb and the airplane, they combine earlier techniques with new scientific advances. Commerce and politics, race and religion – spheres of modernity in its benevolent and fighting faces – such as they were deployed in the colonies of Christian Europe came to function as divisions of knowledge whereby old alliances, different conceptions of community and of sociability, older forms of identity, were reshaped, abolished, indeed,
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