The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West

by Hamid Dabashi

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.

Genres: History, Islam, Nonfiction, Cultural

363 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 19, 2022

About the author

Born on 15 June 1951 into a working class family in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.

He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.

In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.

A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book I have been looking forward to and pre-ordered last summer (published in September) "The End of Two Illusions. Islam after the West" (University of California Press, 2022) by Hamed Dabashi, among my go-to interpreters of the contemporary hell we live in.

A few thoughts and take-aways:

#1 - The core argument seems, on the surface, straightforward enough: the idea of an innate hostility between 'Islam' and 'the West' is flawed as it's based on a fictitious binary. So far, so standard post/structural/ post-colonial thought. But wait for it.

#2 - This fictitious binary opposition is a fairly recent colonial invention which has wracked havoc in modern history (also re: war on terror). This binary has exhausted its destructive course; the book is 'a nail in its coffin'.

#3 - This presumed opposition (Huntington etc) corresponds to a particular period of globalized capital when its innate contradictions are in need of a fictive centre and a global periphery cast as culturally inferior to 'the west' ready for exploitation and domination. Within this, Islam continues to be systematically cast as a deranged culture destined to be ruled by white Christians. This false consciousness is rooted in the 19th century concept of Europe as the epicenter of civilization and its continued importance (especially after 9/11) is politically motivated and part of fear of losing the stronghold of white Christian supremacy (fed by Islamophobia). This is also quite standard post-colonial stuff.

#5 - The core argument of the book (finalized in Spring 2021) is that we are currently seeing the end of Islamism as one of the most potent political ideologies of the last 200 years. Relatedly, at exactly the moment when there's a militant crescendo in defense of 'western civilization', there's also a collapse of the latter colonial fabrication (he uses the powerful metaphor of the twin towers of 'Islam' and 'the West' collapsing). Now this is where it gets interesting.

#6 Mind you, the book was written before the most mind blowing Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021. On that day, or rather days of withdrawal, I was also wondering: what's next for empire? And sure enough, within days we were advised that the real enemy is no longer necessarily muslim but Russia and possibly China. H.D.: "Islam and the West" with its political function concluded it is now entirely obsolete - having vacated the space it once occupied for a yet-to-be articulated set of alternatively dangerous configurations." More on this later.

#7 'The west' did not misrepresent Islam (or the Orient) but co-invented an 'Islam' best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining an illusion of its own civilizational and racial superiority (embedded in the materials requirement of the colonial economics of robbing continents of wealth and wherewithal - I think this is also all fairly established in more Marxist theories of race and imperialism).

#8 This is where H.D departs from / transcends Said and Fanon who were also products of their time but ultimately 'counter-essentialized the two components of the false binary (west/orient) - inadvertently corroborating and thus authenticating them rather than dismantling the 'bifocal metaphor' which was created and sustained under conditions of coloniality. "The kinds of deconstructive gestures that Said and followers have made have also paradoxically strengthened the metaphoric power of 'the west' and thus compromised emancipatory thinking that seeks to dismantle not merely criticize 'the west' (similar to 'orientalism in reverse')

# 9 How so? "In order to dismantle that metaphor, we need to actively historicize it and show that it has now finally overcome itself (...) we also need a more liberatory theory which requires a shift from the condition of coloniality not just toward postcolonialism but also a moral and imaginative decoloniality, where we reverse the false historical consciousness of an imperial imagination that has overwhelmed the geographical divides we have been led to take for granted". So THAT is what the book is trying to do.

#10 Here is also where it gets tricky for me: the 'end of the west' as diagnosed in the book is "not just political positioning against the ideologues of the west (...) but based on the dissolution of any centre for the operation of accumulated capital or any fixed continental location for abused labour and raw material (...) globalized capitalism makes a mockery of the west and east (Saddam Hussein as much beneficiary of US Imperialism as CEOs of Enron). I think some theorists of imperialism would disagree with the idea of an amorphous and uncentered global capitalism. Be this as it may - H.D.: "This amorphous capital has finally given birth to an amorphous empire, which is contingent neither on fixed territorial conquests nor on clear ideological articulations (...). Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UAE, Egypt and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world are all integral to this 'empire of bases' with their reactionary and counterrevolutionary claims to Islam entirely intact".

#11 On Islam. Another strength of the book is also its insights on the history of Islam, in its very essence arguing that with the rise of colonial modernity in the late 18th century, Muslims throughout the world were systematically forced to transform their ancestral faith from a rich and multifaceted metaphysical and cultural experience into a site of inflexible ideological resistance to colonialism. "What we today call Islam is overwhelmingly colored by its recent (200 years) aggressive mutation into a site of political contestation against European colonialism (...) Islam in its haste to 'oppose' 'the west', muslim ideologues turned islam into an illusion itself, a mirror image of what they opposed".

#12 As has been said elsewhere and coming from slightly different theoretical backgrounds - the war on terror and the rise of the IS (Daesh) are two sides of the same coin of barbarity. To get out of this trap of war and destruction, we also need to transcend the ideological framework within it exists. However, looking at how 'the west' and the defense of 'western values' has re-emerged in the most militarist and hawkish opposition to Russia (and China), I am afraid Dabashi is right "The West" was the grandest illusion of capital, it used the west to hide itself behind a civilizational facade."

[Bear Hendricks · Rating 1 out of 5]

Repetitive, wordy, unbalanced, biased, self-righteous - got 60 pages in and was over.