الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

partition. Moreover, and in a way that remains more difficult to recognize but to which Tocqueville alerts us, the new technologies of colonial divisions were at their most efficient in the realm of knowledge. These forms of “colonialist knowledge” (Pandey, Construction , 6) were about restructuring knowledge and functioned so as to separate religion from politics, politics from commerce, and commerce from religion and politics. And each of these separations was enacted, incarnated in the restructuring, the management of communities and, that soon to be invented object of demography, “populations” (Kateb, Européens ). The point was less to eradicate enmity, as Tocqueville makes clear, it was rather to manage enemies, to rule and discipline them by refusing to grant them political identities or preventing their unification on the basis of religion. Colonial rule and knowledge was about preventing religion from becoming politics, hiding that conquest and commerce were a Christian enterprise, in which Christian powers competed but also collaborated. Not just divide and rule, then, but divide knowledge and rule, calling one group a race, another a religion, a third a polity. Calling this religion, and calling that race; calling this commerce, and calling that science. Like the bomb and the airplane, which were exported and imported in and out of Europe, colonial rule, along with its theologico-political divisions, along with race science and legal devices to claim territories or redistribute land, was practiced outside of Europe and inside it as well. The balancing movement between Europe and the “colored world” is a complicated one. It is said, for example, that Columbus took an Arabic speaking Jewish translator with him, for he thought he would thus be able to communicate with the native of India he expected to encounter. In the remainder of this paper, I want to turn to my main topic, Jews and Arabs, in order to describe some of the ways in which the dividing lines that continue to separate these “groups” have been constructed by ways of technologies of rule and governance such as the ones I have described so far.

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