Beyond the decolonial: Critical Muslim geographies

Abstract

This paper considers selected decolonial moves in geography, building on engagements with postcolonial theory since the 1990s and earlier currents of radical geography. Whilst the paper charts their interactions, including the impacts of selective intellectual influences from Latin America, it foregrounds Muslim geographies. The decolonization of Muslim geographies questions concepts and upgrades terminology, and speaks to crucial interfaces of circuits of capital, economic and political geographies and area studies. Such moves entail relearning from epistemological, social and spatial ‘peripheries’ and establish connections, notably with Black geographies. The conclusions consider how such links transcend decolonial geographies.

Red Maulanas: Revisiting Islam and the Left in twentieth‐century South Asia

“…Additionally, Islamic Socialism allows scholars to trace the relationship of ideas and practices travelling across and between sites and scales and to re‐think binaries such as “original” and “derivative”, “orthodoxy” and “syncretism”, and “universal” and “vernacular”. Sidaway notes how these concepts become messy for Islam when we consider that the African continent has a Muslim majority and more Arabic speakers than Arabia, the majority of Russian and Balkan Muslim populations are not descended from migrant populations, and that South Asia contains more Muslims than the Middle East (Sidaway, 2022). Similarly, Cedric Robinson mentions how Marxism “acquired historical significance in the Third World” (Robinson, 2000).…”

Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. Olúfẹ́miTáíwò. C. Hurst & Co (in collaboration with the International African Institute), London, UK, 2022, pp. xvii + 270. ISBN 978‐1‐787‐38692‐1 (pbk).

“…Later, T aíwò reiterates, to: 'Insist that the ultimate problem with decolonisation discourse is its oft-unappreciated failure to take seriously the complexity of African agency and the many ways it has grappled with both colonialism and its legacy' (p. 183À84). Some of these arguments in fact echo others who have problematized the historical axes of before-and-after European colonization around which much decolonial analysis elsewhere hinges, such as Harris (1995) on the Andean Americas and work on critical Muslim geographies (Sidaway, 2022) and some of the essays in a recent collection on 'Thinking the Re-Thinking of the World: Decolonial Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences from Africa, Asia and the Middle East' (Kresse & Sounaye, 2022). At the same time, T aíwò wants to transcend the fixation on modern European colonialism and broaden the range of colonialisms (or perhaps more accurately empires) whose agency and roles in Africa count, citing 'Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman colonialisms…and Arab colonialism on the East African littoral ' (p. 153).…”

Languages ofdin:Place, history, and paths

“…Ahmet Süheyl Ünver would go on to become one of 20th century Istanbul's most important cultural historians and masters of the ‘traditional’ Turkish and Islamic arts (Hammond, 2022; Sayar, 1994). As I was reading James Sidaway's (2023) article, ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’, I returned to Ünver. How might Sidaway's arguments help us to understand Ünver's life and sense of self in a different way?…”