Episode 204: Race & Religion in South Asia &, well, Not-The-US

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes

(because citations are political)

While last episode was all about race & religion in what’s now the US, this episode is all about race & religion elsewhere. We talked about how race and religion isn’t just a US phenomena; EuroAmerican definitions of race fundamentally shaped/shape the world’s understanding of race, even if local varieties are homegrown; and Muslims are racialized in meaningful, semi-consistent ways globally.

We didn’t add any new keywords this time! But you can find previous ones in our glossary.

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

  • This whole episode grounds us in the imperial histories of race & religion outside of the US, and especially as it relates to Muslims and Islam.

  • Why imperialism again?

    • Because as you remember from earlier episodes (this one and this one, particularly), the eras of European imperialism are when we see the invention of modern race and religion—as categories, as systems, as hegemonies. In part, this is because European (and later, American) white Protestant Christians made up systems of race and religion as part of their imperialization. These processes were never separate, nerds, so they can’t be separated on our lil’ podcast.

      • Ilyse broke down how definitions of Muslims as a race in British-ruled South Asia came to be part of global systems of racialization—because, duh, the sun never set on the British Empire, so it never set on (white Christian) folks assuming what (brown and Black) Muslim folks were.

      • Ilyse also argued that this one regime—one overarching set of legal, cultural, political, and linguistic ideas—decided that a given population was inherently violent, incompatible with its statecraft, unruly, and different. This is, in part, how Muslims became racialized: the British, deploying their dudes with pens, proved that Muslims were this one thing, and that their Muslimness—not their Indian-ness or their Nigerian-ness or their Iraqi-ness—was the most important thing to know about them. Nevermind that these wide, wide swaths of humanity speak different languages, have different cultural norms, are different ethnicities even within one region, and are represented across a wide range of skin tones. Their Islam defined them.

      • And, Ilyse argued, this isn’t just about the British blokes: European empires fundamentally agree(d) on race theory. They disagreed on who should win—they each wanted their own global domination. But they flat-out agreed, across the whole damned continent & later the Atlantic Ocean, that white Christians were better than and ought to rule non-white, non-Christians the world over. At home and abroad. So, while there are differences in how this worked in French colonial spaces vs. British ones, the premise of religio-racial superiority remained. 

  • As examples, Ilyse & Megan walked us through British India, notions of “the Muslim World,” the ways that the US draws on this anti-Muslim racialization in its formation of laws, policies, and policing.

  • Ilyse & Megan also talked about the spaces of radical innovation that stemmed from racializing a global religion comprised of an incredible diversity of humans. They talked about how some Muslims, being labeled One Coherent Thing, took that idea to heart, and developed transnational alliances and common ground as, say, a strategy of imperial resistance, a new way to imagine theology, and a way to harness collectives against European powers.

  • The episode take-aways:

    • European Empires did their gross stuff across the globe, and since they ruled or came to influence nearly the whole globe, Muslims experienced that rule in distinctive ways.

    • Muslims were racialized as one group, unified by their religious affiliation, despite all other (obvious) differences.

    • Some Muslims found creative spaces within that racialization—redefining and rethinking ideas about global Islamic belonging.

  • Don’t get it twisted, though, nerds: racialization is a dehumanizing process even if Muslims found places of agency within it. And, even though we talked about how Muslims experience(d) this global phenomena, there are real ways that it is expressed locally—differences that amount to genocide in some places, concentration camps in others, and inequitable legal protections, among other effects.

Primary Sources:

(because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing)

Megan talked about an experience while teaching where a student called her Megan (it’s Dr. Goodwin if you’re nasty) after fundamentally refusing to believe that his perspectives on Muslim women were, in fact, so racist as to be banally violent and utterly predictable.

Ilyse talked about how her Bosnian Muslim students at UVM are often rendered invisible because, as white Europeans/European-Americans, their Islam isn’t seen as valid. Because racializing Islam means rendering Muslims not-white. She also talked about the hardship and pain she sees in her classrooms when Bosnian Muslims, who are by and large in the States due to the 1992 genocide, have to justify not only their identity but also their experience of genocidal hate. In short: do better, America, and let’s add the last 70 years of history to our K-12 curriculums. Less Teapot Dome Scandal, more Bosnian genocide: our students’ lives and identities demand it.

Story Time:

(citing our theoretical influences)

We cited intellectual hero and friend-of-the-pod Cemil Aydin’s fantastic book, The Idea of the Muslim World: a Global Intellectual History (2017).

Aydin’s work makes clear that our very phrase “the Muslim world” belies a real & obvious racialization of Muslims—do they have their own planet to retreat to, one that is separate from “the rest?”

Ilyse teaches this book regularly—and recommends it highly. Here’s the bit we read and explored:

“The idea of the Muslim world is inseperable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumption of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, given rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.” (5-6)

Megan helped us unpack this by reminding our dear nerds that we can’t separate out race from religion nor religion from race. They are co-constituative. She also added that when we’re talking about racialization we are talking about power: whole systems that teach us, reward us, remind us how to enforce and maintain bias, ideology, and hate.

Ilyse said that this work is really important to her because it just lays bare how these systems rewrite and rewire the world. It isn’t just EuroAmericans telling everyone there’s a Muslim world, and the world sort of just like rolling over. It’s also Muslims using that label and those laws and systems to band together in new ways, sometimes successfully and other times not, to live within and under these systems.

Homework!

(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)

Ilyse, shocking not one of you nerds, had a lot to assign:

Megan also assigned homework, duh:

  • Cheating, but Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Musilm World, and some interviews about it like this one (written) or that one (New Books podcast).

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