Modernity’s global crises originate from structures that used the Other as instruments

Evidence

The radical crisis of the modern project in Euro-America, as elsewhere, demands a radical solution, a fact that bears directly on how we should henceforth study Islam, its “law,” and nearly everything else. At the center of this argument stand two essential facts: (1) the crises of the modern project are global, in both causes and effects, which is to say that the modern structures productive of the ill effects have spread, through imperialism and colonialism, to all continents and are currently found in nearly every country, to one degree or another; and (2) every sector of ill effect has impacted material and sociopolitical reality in virtually all aspects of existence. The disappearance of one species, the decimation of a human group, the reengineering of long-standing cultures, or the pollution or deforestation of one region—each of these has created chain reactions negatively impacting ecological, psychoepistemic, and social balance in other spheres. And if the crisis is undeniably common to all, in effect representing a serious threat to the natural and social commons, then the commensurate moral responsibility (assumed here to be more binding than any legal or political responsibility) must be borne by all those who have a say about it. Put succinctly, if the Other, human and nonhuman, has been the means to, and instrument of, the formation of imperialist and colonialist modernity, then it is this Other that must be retrieved as the critical center in the project of transcending modernity. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters of Restating Orientalism on modernity’s epistemic foundations, and to postcolonial theory generally (Said, Chakrabarty). — connects to: Modernity can be defined by the widening orbit between powerful and powerless — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 444
• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that the Other must be repositioned as the critical center for transcending modernity — not merely recovered or given voice — is a dense paradigm-level claim combining moral responsibility with epistemic reconstruction.