Forced religious conversion did not by itself produce epistemic or structural genocide.

Evidence

These considerations somewhat problematize the arguments of several Latin American scholars and intellectuals, such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who regard the “long sixteenth century” as the spatiotemporal site in which modernity and its peculiar forms of colonialism originated. Yet, insisting on Christianity as having fulfilled only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition would simultaneously allow for their and my narratives to stand not only intact but also in complementary and mutually supportive ways. It is not essential for my account to deprive the “long sixteenth century” of the thrust of a protomodern colonialism, but it is clear that the later forms of colonial sovereignty transcended and qualitatively complicated those articulated in that century. It can hardly be argued, for instance, that the forced conversions of the Muslims and Jews in Andalusia possessed the same structures of domination as those embedded in juridicality and education of the nineteenth century, however particularly brutal these conversions were. Forced conversions surely existed for millennia and were practiced by several empires throughout Asia, but did not result in cultural, epistemic, or structural genocide. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 692 (#expands, via linked claim)

Nowhere in Dussel’s account do we find a convincing solution to the challenge he posed: if the ego conquiro mediated the ego extermino in European Christianity, then why did the former never “succeed” in yielding the same effects in Chinese, Indian, Muslim, and other contexts? Why did the ego conquiro of Islam, which fully shared the concept and practice of conversion with Christianity, never lead to ego extermino? — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 171 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Conversion theology alone does not produce colonial genocide — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 171; Forced conversion alone never produced the structural genocide of modern colonial sovereignty — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 692; The Holocaust was not the logical culmination of prior antisemitism

Broader Connections

• Forced conversion alone never produced the structural genocide of modern colonial sovereignty #expands (0.95) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 692
• Conversion theology alone does not produce colonial genocide #expands (0.92) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 171