"I will then give an account of the composition of its [Islam's] premodern intellectual and discursive proclivities, before I demonstrate how with the rise of capitalist modernity it was transformed into a singular and exclusive site of ideological resistance to colonialism and thus lost the diversified texture of its multifaceted heritage, as it was mutated by Muslim ideologues into the mirror image of the paramount power they faced, which they called 'the West.'" (8)
"Said, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world." (9)
"The rise of 'Islam and the West' as a de-formative and dangerous binary happens entirely in the fateful encounter of the last Muslim empires and the encroaching global domination of European empires, which takes us from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Such was the ideological nomenclature of an imperial encounter: a self-narrative that kept feeding on itself from both sides of the divide. But, again, the divide was not true. It was and remains a false consciousness. It is long overdue that we dispense with these two misbegotten twins." (28)
"'The West' thus becomes a secular religion with capitalist modernity as its liturgical substance, the ideology of its imperial conquests, the emblem of its white supremacy and civilizing mission, with 'Islam' as its chief nemesis." (29)
"Historically, European colonialism and Western Christianity have been constitutionally integral to and categorically subservient to each other: Colonialism serving Christianity by paving the way toward the global Christianization of the world, and Christianity serving colonialism by teaching the natives how to turn the other cheek." (121)
Hamid Dabashi, The End of Two Illusions: Islam After the West (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
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