Colonial capitalism and print made Islamic elites adopt European decline narratives

Evidence

European historical reason (including the notion of an Islamic Golden Age followed by a secular decline under the Ottomans) was adopted by the new elites, he suggests, via books from and about Europe, as well as the Islamic “classics” selected for printing by European orientalists and by Westernized Egyptians. That civilizational discourse could now be used, concludes Schulze, to legitimize the claim to equality and independence. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1049 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The easy alliances demonstrated in these three books between racism, neo-liberalism, the American politics of empire and Israeli politics of occupation reveal the tie that binds them: a wilful inattention to history. In culture-clash explanations, if fundamentalism has arisen in Muslim parts of the world, it is because that is how they are. We cannot begin to consider, as Yegenoglu does of veiling in Colonial Fantasies, how colonial policies in Algeria, for example, so denigrated everything Islamic that anti-colonial movements won popular support by proposing a return to Islamic tradition, a tradition understood largely as the opposite of the foreigners. Within the Manichean world created by colonialism, women’s bodies remained the terrain on which men sought to articulate their desires and fears. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 242 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The decline-of-Islamic-science narrative is a Eurocentric fabrication.; Historical novels spread the colonial decline narrative to mass Egyptian readership; State-commissioned Egyptian textbooks reproduced European theories of Islamic decline (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial-era elites adopted European civilizational decline discourse to claim independence #corroborates (0.93) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1049
• Colonial denigration of Islam drove anti-colonial movements to embrace Islam as resistance #complicates (0.78) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 242