The End of Two Illusions

Islam after the West

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520376922
• eBook ISBN: 9780520976320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Dismantling the myths that divide Islam and the West, this cutting-edge work of critical thinking proposes new ways to reread Islamic and world histories.

Extending from the front-page news coverage of our daily lives back into the deepest and most revelatory histories of the last two hundred years and earlier, Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two Illusions is a daring, provocative, and groundbreaking work that dismantles the most dangerous delusions manufactured between two vastly fetishized abstractions: "Islam" and "the West." With this book, Dabashi shows how the civilizational divides imagined between these two cosmic binaries have defined their entanglement—in ways that have nothing to do with the lived experiences of either Muslims or the diverse and changing communities scarcely held together by the myth of "the West."

Through detailed historical and contemporary analysis, The End of Two Illusions untangles the motivations that produced this global fiction. Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of "Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable manifestations. Dabashi argues it is long past time to dismantle this dangerous liaison, expose and overcome its perilous delusions, and reimagine the world beyond its shimmering mirage. The End of Two Illusions is the most iconoclastic work of critical thought and scholarship to emerge in recent memory, clearing the way toward a far more liberating imaginative geography of the world we share.

Index

Abbasid Empire (750–1258), 25, 27, 74, 75, 242–43

Abd al-Rahman Al Ghafiqi, 32

Abd al-Raziq, Ali (1888–1966), 111

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 14

Abduh, Muhammad (1849–1905), 13, 110–11, 115–16, 143

Abernathy, Whitney, 101–2

Abode of Peace vs. Abode of War (Dar al-Islam vs. Dar al-Harb), 107–9

Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamed, 171–72

Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 22, 23, 249

Adams, Abigail, 202

Adorno, Theodor, 159, 220

Adventures of Haji Baha of Isfahan (1824), 256–60

Aeschylus (circa 525–455 BC), 22, 240–41, 249, 256

Afghani, Jamal al-Din al- (1838–1897), 13, 110, 143, 270–71

Afghanistan: Afghanistan, US 2021 withdrawal from, 291–94; Soviet Afghan war 1979–1989, 148; US war with, as ideological war, 6

Aflatoun, Inji (1924–1989), 207–8

Africa: capitalist modernity, effects of, 93, 96–97, 122, 125, 241–42; colonial history in, 46–47, 135; Columbia University Core Curriculum and, 218, 219, 220; French colonialism in, 35; The Invention of Africa (1988), 15; invention of Western civilization and, 83, 157, 160, 161, 213; Islam, history of in Africa, 62, 70, 225–28; Islamism, rise of, 113, 142–43; Kant, racism of, 78, 88–89; key historical landmarks, 23, 26; labor migrations in, 141; Malcolm X and remembering African Islam, 228–32; slaves, African Muslim traditions of, 226–28, 229; South Africa as part of the illusion of “the West,” 38; US military engagement in, 292

Agamben, Georgio, 153

Aghlabids (800–909), 27

Ahmad, Aziz, 238

Ahmad Khan, Seyyed (1817–1898), 113

Aidi, Hisham, 223–25

“Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851), 189, 201–2

Ajami, Fouad, 116, 119, 165

Alexander the Great (336–323 BC), 22, 23–24, 247–48, 250

Ali, Mohammed (1769–1849; viceroy of Egypt, 1805–1848), 110

Aligarth Muslim University, 114

Almohad (1121–1269), 27

Almoravids (1040–1147), 27

A Love Supreme (1964), 223–24

Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 258

al-Qaeda, 148–53

American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear (2018), 3–4

Americanism, 157

Anatolia, 25

Anderson, Martin, 155

Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College, 113

Another Cosmopolitanism (2008), 92

Ansar, 64

Anthony, Kwame, 256

Anthropology and Colonial Encounter (1973), 14

anti-Muslim violence: rise of and historical context, 1–5. See also Islamophobia

anti-Semitism, 39, 221, 294

Appiah, Anthony Kwame, 92

Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274), 44–45

The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1990), 237

Arabic Thought and the Western World (1964), 239

Arab-Israeli conflict: Gaza and Israel, 2021 conflict between, 283–91; influence on Edward Said, 48, 246, 267; Israel, creation of state, 105–6, 111–12; Osama bin-Laden and, 150–51

Arab-Israeli War (1967), 11...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I · The Colonial Catalyst
• II · The Return of the Repressed
• III · Where the Twain Have Met
• Conclusion: “The Inverted Consciousness of the World”
• Epilogue: 2021: After Gaza and Afghanistan
• Notes
• Index