In Conversation: Epistemology, Critical Race Theory and Critical Muslim Studies
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Salam, this is In Conversation from Network Reorient in association with Reorient Journal and the Critical Muslim Studies Project. We aim to explore the post-western, reconnect the Islamosphere. In this episode, Uzma Jamil is in conversation with Stephen Sheehy on epistemology, critical race theory and critical Muslim studies. Hello everyone, welcome to this podcast of Reorient.

My name is Uzma Jamil and I'm here today with Professor Stephen Chihay, the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of Arab Studies at the College of William & Mary in the States. Professor Chihay is also the founding faculty director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary. So welcome and thank you for being with us here today, Stephen. Thank you for having me.

So, I want to begin maybe just by asking you to tell us a little bit about what your work is about. What are some intellectual themes and threads that you find productive and interesting in your work? Oh, well, thanks for asking. I'm very noisy chair here. So, for me to hear a lot of preaching probably.

Well, I think my work is pretty diverse over the past 20 years. You know, sort of intellectual heritage of the Arab world and then sort of and also Islamophobia, photography, visual studies, and with a very compelling part of it being about Palestine, especially in this region.

So within that sort of array, I think, of topics, one thing that sort of cuts across it is the idea of the epistemology of modernity, or I think what people would be calling more the epistemology of coloniality and how it sort of, for me, how it was constructed indigenously as much as imposed.

how Muslim and Arab subjects are conscripted to sort of swallow the red pill and sort of be believers and the coloniality and modernity as sort of natural things and sort of liberalism.

And so I'm just really kind of fascinated about that, about the ways in which we as brown people, as Arabs, as Middle Easterners come to sort of live in a world that is dominated by particular forms of thought that are the components of and determined by sort of

of capitalism, racial capitalism and modernity. So that's kind of the big peak, sort of what unites a very sort of diverse move. Okay, so there's a lot there. We could go in a lot of different directions with that. I guess maybe let me ask you sort of a way of trying to narrow that down a bit. What kind of threads or overlaps do you see between your work and critical wisdom studies? Yeah, well, that's, I mean, that's really a great question because I think, you know,

When we think about critical race studies and critical Muslim studies, I think what is really interesting about them is that they depart from

from previous methodologies about rethinking the intersectionality between a number of different ideological formations. So, you know, the issue that folks are, you know, what appeal

appeals to me about critical race studies and critical Muslim studies is that is how they really are trying to get their mind around the way race, racial capitalism, gender, colonialism, all sort of meet in different scales and ratios. So when we think about, for example, Islamophobia,

rather than us understanding this just in terms of, say, East versus West or in terms of Said's work, which is invaluable, it allows us to also to understand what do we have when we have Orientalism that has also overlaps or comes also from

Right.

that different forms of Islamophobia, for example, serve social reproduction, right? Certain that we're like, what is what is Islamophobia help us think or help folks do, right? I mean, it's very easy to say just allows for the United States to justify the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan or Muslim lands or our world. But sort of what else is it playing upon, right? So I think critical race theory and critical Muslim studies

helps us think about that, right? Rather than us just thinking about East versus West. The East is a construct, a subject of knowledge that colonialism created. Yeah, this is all true. But it allows us to think about the ways in which that also

it also coincides with the rise of racial capitalism, right? For example, right? So I don't know if that's specific enough, but I think that's one of the things that really make, you know, critical race theory and critical Muslim studies sort of pertinent in my work. Okay. So I want to, so your answer sort of makes me think of two things. One is I would argue that

Critical Muslim Studies brings together the idea of Muslim as a racialized subject, which then places this subject within particular histories and genealogies of racial formation and ideological formation like you're talking about.

And I think the other thing that it does, which I'm not sure that critical race theory does in as much sort of emphasis is thinking about decoloniality and bringing that piece in to it as well. So how do we think then about this kind of Muslim as a racialized subject?

within certain kinds of histories and how do we connect that with coloniality and then thinking about decoloniality. Right, now you're giving me the big one. So that's really complex because I think when we think about the issues, if we think about Islamophobia, for example, through critical race theory and through critical Muslim studies,

What it forces us also to do is to understand Islamophobia itself as really a variegated sort of phenomenon that serves particular sort of political context, right? So my book, for example,

and was very, very, very concerned with only concentrating in what Islamophobia looks like in the United States. Because in the United States, it falls within a very specific tradition of racialization. So there's no way to really talk about Muslims in the United States without talking about also Black Americans. Because we live in a racialized society that is defined within Islamophobia.

sort of a racial spectrum that at one very end is the abject black body, right? And the dehumanized black body. And on the other hand is the ideal whiteness and ideal of the white body.

And of course, the Muslim in the United States falls in between that, within that spectrum. This might actually be a bit different about how it functions, for example, in Holland, right? Or in the UK that has a very weird and unfortunate and brutal colonial history within the Arab world. So I think this is, that's one thing I think for us,

to try to acknowledge that brings us to the second point, the issue of decoloniality. And so decoloniality obviously is not just a magic gesture that we can sort of all just stop thinking about.

the way we do now, we can unracialize and unthink and unlearn what we've learned and then just go back to something else. It really depends about context, right? It depends about us locating our own particular positionality and our historical positions within those specific racial histories. So for example, as for me, for example, as an Arab American Christian who finds himself racialized along

a spectrum within blackness, but also in relation to Muslim Arab Muslim identities within the United States helps to triangulate and to make us think about, OK, how are we going to decolonialize? What are the power structures that we're pinging off of? What are the privileges that we share and that we have to sort of destroy or reject?

So I think, I don't know if, again, this is all too abstract, but I think it's really, really super decolonial. It makes us really think about how to unwind within the particular context in which we are able to identify through critical race theory and critical Muslim studies. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. No, so I think.

I think I agree with you. I think the bigger question for me, or perhaps the tension that arises, is thinking about this in national terms. So within the national history, so, you know, U.S. history is distinct, as you said, from British history, for example. But then also trying to think about this sort of across nations, or even perhaps across empires, if we're talking about a different time period. And so how do we

So what I see here is a tension, and I think maybe, I don't know necessarily if we need to resolve the tension, but simply to say that thinking about these histories within a national context and tracing it in a particular way, how do we then have a conversation with somebody who's located within a different country?

a different history and different context beyond simply acknowledging that there is a different national history and a genealogy that's at play. Right. Right. Well, I think this is actually what's really interesting. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately about what the more current thinking within critical race studies and critical Muslim studies has encouraged us to do is

is to think about difference, but rather than follow the model of liberalism, which is a model of liberalism is to

look for sameness and sort of like, you know, we're all one, it's okay. And like, let's kumbaya, let's just hold hands and kind of like display state difference. It's actually understand difference and let difference stand next to each other one by one. And that is what true solidarity is, is where we stand together in difference, but also work towards

the remediation of the violence that systems impose on us. So it's in, for example, Islamophobia in the United States, I would say, and this is, so this is me being slightly pedantic and crude, but Islamophobia in the United States over the past, obviously 20 years or 25, or maybe even 30 years has been increasingly violent, increasingly pernicious and increasingly visible.

I would say before that Islamophobia, as the formation that it is now, didn't exist in the way it did. It expressed itself in terms of anti-Arab racism.

hate, and that has to do a lot with Arab socialism, Arab revolutionary movements, and Arab liberation movements, and of course, Palestine. So how can we look at, for example, the violence in which Muslim Americans have to live every day, but also understand it in relation to the violence that Black Americans have to live every day?

And we don't have to say, oh, yeah, I'm black like you because you're not. Right. You're Pakistani. Well, you may be, you know, maybe a black African Muslim. But, you know, in many ways, you don't have to say there is that we both are victims of white supremacy, which we are. But there are different degrees in which we suffer or are victimized by white

or partake in white supremacy. So I think for me, it's a matter of thinking about those differences, not as things, as places to separate, but to also acknowledge those distances as really, really essential and as catalysts for solidarity.

You see what I'm saying? Right, right. So I think a couple of thoughts come to mind. One, I think your idea of difference and sameness. I agree with you on sort of the liberalism that we're all sort of happily the same and the Kumbaya, that critique. And I think when you're saying difference, I would understand that as power.

and differentials of power in particular, because I think what liberalism is very good at is erasing power and sort of allowing all of us to be sort of happily the same. So I think that in terms of difference. Now, the other thing I was just thinking of as you were speaking is sort of difference across national contexts. And

And thinking about that actually is sort of logics, racialized logics, colonial logics, which intersect and as you say, sort of create subject positions that are distinct. So they're not all collapsed together. All brown people, black people are not the same. They do not experience violence in the same way, even if they all do experience violence. So I think we can make that distinction between being subject to violence and violence, but then not necessarily having the same subject position.

Because there are distinctive histories that are attached to different communities. So I think

Which then I like, so I agree with you on that, if we sort of follow down that in that train of thought, then that this concept of solidarity across communities and across groups then kind of has to take that into account as well in order for it to be effective. And all of this is sort of within a larger critique of liberalism, right? Exactly.

So I think this actually creates a really nice segue into what I wanted to talk about next. So one of the things I've been thinking about and talking about with various friends and colleagues is sort of what's happening politically right now in not just in North America, but in sort of its sort of chain reaction across other countries. And so how do we think about... So for me, the question is, how do we think about this current political moment as not simply...

a single event or a series of single events, but as part of a history. And so what does this present make visible to us about the past? Because I'm sort of very wary of analyses that tend to be

focused on explaining you know what happened just now right and it's completely sort of outside of time and outside of history and outside of politics in a broader sense right so what are your thoughts on that yeah i mean that's great i mean because there's a lot of issues that that that are sort of are kind of exploding right now that is one is the you know the

the bold-facedness of what white supremacy actually looks like, what whiteness actually looks like, what racial capitalism looks like, and how, you know, of

Blackness has been globalized within a globalized set of formation. This is what Bill Button's summer talk was about, right? So I think it's funny because the current moment, I think there's a lot there to say. And one of the things I would say is, you know, BIPOC folklore,

always live in, and I hate this metaphor, but I'm going to use it because I don't like gendered words, but they always live in pregnant moments, right? Their whole life is a pregnant moment. It's one consistent moment of tension that is always on the verge of explosion because they live the tensions. They are the borderline.

crossing. They are the border town. That's where they live, right? And that's why, of course, they have the consciousness, right? And so...

Bipocs live and understand the contradictions of racial capitalism and white supremacy the most. And so it's always on the verge of potential explosion. I don't know why George Floyd picked it over. I mean, why wasn't it Rodney King?

when we were all on the streets again. Why didn't Rodney King 30 years ago result in a mass national uprising that would have been spun into a global uprising? You know what I mean? I don't know what is it about the moment in particular. I do think, though, that one suspect thing I do have is that

white supremacy has become so visible. And I do believe that the biggest danger that the United States faces is actually the mobilization of a very pernicious, very real fascist rebellion. And I think that the backlash, let's say, of having a black president has really

emboldened white nationalists. And I think so in many ways, the air is full of electricity already. So I think this allows the sort of spark that we get through this video of George Floyd being murdered, gratuitously and blatantly murdered by cops, which again is nothing new.

It was the sort of spark that hit this electricity already in the air. And I think that just, again, I think what I think the thing is about capitalism in general, it doesn't hide its contradiction. Its contradictions are always there.

Right? White supremacy is always there. Racial capitalism is always there. We always live it. It's just a matter of peeking in and out of this consciousness to be able to understand this contradiction and act on them. I think to some degree that's the sort of vagaries of history right now.

Yeah, I don't know if that kind of gets to the point. Yeah, I think I would, I agree with you. And I think I would say actually that you're right, that it's always been there, this history. I think some people had the luxury of not seeing it. Right. And not living it, right? And I think what's changed in this moment is that a lot of people who previously were in that group are like, whoa, wow.

You know, like, is this, you know, so like, what's going on here? And I think a lot of people are color sort of like, dude, you just saw this now. Right. And but that's where I think like the only problem with that analysis, I think it lets, you know, Whitey off the hook.

Right. It's like you have the luxury of not saying, well, what are you freaking what are you producing and not seeing it? I think I mean, people have been saying this for ages. Right. I mean, Black Lives Matter was just only a couple of years ago. Right. I mean, these are that's the thing. I don't you know, you walk down the street in Richmond and you have a an avenue. It's called the Avenue of Monuments. And they're all colonial monuments.

I mean, a Confederate monuments, right? I live in a town and I would like to acknowledge that I live in pumpkin, pumpkin, stolen territory. I live in a town which is ground zero of the invasion of the British colonization of North America. Now, I mean,

My neighborhood is named after, you know, Powhatan, you know, Pocahontas' father, right? Quote, unquote, Pocahontas, right? I mean, it's all here. It's not, I don't think they have a luxury of seeing. I think their willingness not to speak reproduces and is essential in reproducing this stuff. And it's when Black people rose up and broke that comfort level

the comfort level of you being able to reproduce this system. It's when Black people, when the fear inside of you of a Black revolt

Busted through is when that quote unquote luxury of not singing disappears. And that's when liberals are happy to jump on board, you know, you know, reform. Right. Because they see that their luxury, their comfort level might actually lead to a complete destruction of the racial capitalist society in which they live.

Right. And the privileges in which they benefit. So I think, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, so that the idea of like luxury of not seeing like, yes, I get it. But on the other hand, it's kind of like for me, it's the luxury. You don't have the luxury of reproducing that blindness.

Right. Right.

So I... Okay, so I agree with you, and I think I want to push you a bit further. But because I think BLM has been around for a long time. And they've been calling for this for a long time. So...

The question is not so much that Black people haven't been active and people of color haven't been active in critiquing white supremacy and all of its structures and its implications and logics and things. But I think there is something it goes back to what you're saying earlier. There's something about this political moment that removes this, that sort of changes the equation a little bit somehow. And what we're seeing is the impact of that.

we can analyze the why and the how, but we are seeing the what in that sense, right? So I don't think, so I see what you're saying, but I don't think that it's just all of a sudden something happened and they got afraid. However, I agree with you in terms of the sense that centering whiteness, even in a moment, right?

that is actually should be about deconstructing whiteness is a thing. Like we sort of need to be wary of and conscious of. And I think if we're thinking in a bigger sense, not just around one issue, but thinking about connections to decoloniality in a larger way, it is about deconstructing the structures and not simply critiquing them, right? Right. So I think just to, I think, you know,

To move away from maybe my pedantic statement, which I still stand by. Right, so you're going to hang in there with your pedanticness, right. I've seen the fear in your eyes. Maybe to be more diplomatic, what I think is that liberal white society was confronted by their complicity in the reproduction of a system of racial capitalism.

And that when they, when black folks rose in the street and refused to accept the contradiction any longer. And this is when the movement sort of gives an opening to have, to remediate, as you say, systemic issues, right? Now, the question for us is, of course, is,

what is that remediation going to look like? And that's the tensions that we see, right? And I do think there's, I don't ever make generational arguments. I'm really uncomfortable with them because I don't mean generational in this content, in this way, I don't mean generational necessarily in terms of age. I just kind of mean generation in terms of maybe time period. But I do think we are at a point where there's a large swath of people, many of them are younger people,

who have been born into a neoliberal system, who have been born into unvarnished US empire, who have been born into a post, let's say, Rodney King world, a post world where BLM was maybe several years ago and they were 15 or 10 or whatever or 20 when it happened.

So I do think that there are cracks in the contradictions in our system are becoming so pronounced that it is allowing folks to pour into them and mobilize to really think about ways to truly address systemic issues. But the problem is, of course, in the end, this is what I mean by the sort of fear in their eyes, liberals are always there to reform the system rather than dismantling it.

Yes, yes, yes. Okay. So I think what comes to mind, so what you're saying about, you're saying about a generational opening, you know, in terms of thinking about this. I was just thinking the other day, actually, that the pandemic as a political context is also an opening and that it allows the

The it facilitates, I think, a questioning of the hegemonic order in the different ways that it's constituted socially, economically, politically, etc. And I think that is not unconnected to a questioning sort of of the hegemonic order in this way or the crack sort of, you know, it kind of pushes the crack a bit further. So what you're saying, you know, so it.

So I agree with you in the sense that there's sort of a long-term view of this that we need to be thinking about. But I also think that the pandemic as a particular kind of political moment and a questioning of the hegemonic order pushes that crack a bit further. And because we don't yet know how long this is going to last, perhaps it'll be easier to make an analysis when we have an endpoint. Yeah.

At the moment, we're all living through it, even as we're thinking about it and trying to analyze it in light of the things that we already think about. Right. I think it's funny to think about...

the pandemic as the portal, right? As Nanditri Poy said. To think about it as a moment to walk through. Or I think he also says that it's basically a sort of renting of a fabric in which we can see the contradictions of the system. But I also can't help personally to think about

The pandemic is really only the effect of the condition in which we live and have been living for a number of years, but which have come to head with Trump. And that is, number one, that COVID-19 is a product of the neoliberal global era. It is a product of neoliberal global economics.

where people and stuff travel far before communities, right? So what happens is you have this circulation. It's circulated like a commodity, right? So that's number one. And on the other hand, too, I see it as being dealt with through this sort of ethno-nationalist prism in the United States that both...

benefits from neoliberalism, but also disavows it. And that's where Trump's nationalism, sort of ultra nationalism, ethno nationalism comes in and also accentuates or not accentuates, but like gives opportunity for racism to be to be instrumentalized. And so I don't think enough people are talking about, I think they mentioned it as a throwaway, but the anti-Asian racism that's going on.

Right. It's it is anti Asian racism has been at the bottom, at the very ground floor of how folks are addressing this, this, this pandemic in the United States. And my point being is that, I mean, you said it opens up an opportunity, but it also opens up

precisely what is already there. And I think that's kind of, I mean, the opportunity for us in many ways is that it exposes all the contradictions that we already know that they're there. So it clarifies the target for us, right? It clarifies the target because it shows that number one, you do not live in a democratic state that actually gives a shit about you, right? They will let you rot, they will let you die.

And the only reason that they're not is because people are screaming. The only reason not is because you need consumers to go into your restaurant and buy your stuff. You need workers to go and work in the factory that you want to build for low wage labor in this country. So, you know, I think it and it

So I think for me, it clarifies it's less of a renting than more of a sort of, you know, a clarifying process.

I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier in terms of the past, the present making visible the past. Or rather, present making visible what is already there, but which some people see and other people don't. And I think you're right in the sense that the different bodies are affected differently by the pandemic. And if we think about

the parallel to what I was saying earlier about violence and how violence affects different communities. So violence against Black people has a different impact than violence against brown people. So I agree with you in the sense that anti-Asian racism also here in Canada is

you know, has really picked up and it's a thing and people have spoken out against it as sort of, you know, problematic, obviously, in a lot of different ways. But the anti-Asian racism now is actually sort of an echo of anti-Asian racism earlier from the SARS thing, which happened in Toronto. You know, there's sort of a big outbreak in Toronto, the H1N1 thing. So these ideas, I think, in terms of how different kinds of bodies are

are viewed as dangerous and threatening in different ways, and then therefore justify the use of violence against them by the state, and again, in different ways, which I think the pandemic, you know, the violence against those bodies in some sense is the ability for the state to...

to allow some to live and to let others die. So to paraphrase Foucault's biopolitics. But it's different, obviously, in terms of police violence against Black people and here in Canada, again, police violence against Indigenous people, which is sort of an important issue as well.

I am actually aware of the time here. I think we've had a very wide-ranging conversation about any number of things. So I want to maybe close up with one last question for you in terms of, so how do we think about the future? Like we've talked about the present, we've talked about the past and its connections to the past, but how does it help us think about the future in a different way?

keeping in mind that we're all living through this, that there isn't, we haven't arrived at an end point and perhaps we will not, you know, anytime soon. Right. So I just want to, I'm going to answer that partially by also kind of addressing also, we have just sort of kicking around. And I think this is really important because we're talking at the level of abstraction and analysis in many ways, theory and sort of, you know, how we,

the moment, but we also have to remember something else. You said the visible, the current moment allows visible of the history and also current context. But I think something else is important, and I say this as someone who's been involved in activism in Palestine and also in the Arab world. When stuff blows up in the Arab world, oh my God, where did this Arab spring come from? And I think what we are seeing also here, and this actually speaks to how we move forward, is that

there have been brothers and sisters and siblings on the ground

whether they're indigenous people, whether they're Black folk, whether they're people of color, whether they're progressive Muslim Americans, for example, in this country, who have been doing the hard work on the ground, who have been organizing, who have been thinking through things, who have been doing reading groups, right? Who have been developing an analytical framework. And now they're also reaching out to mobilizing communities

Right? And so I think that the future can look like the present. For me, the question is, how do we sustain this present moment into the future? And the way we do that is we continually reach into our communities

keep talking to them, keep mobilizing them, and have them and have us also be here to speak through, have them speak through us, for us to listen to them. And I think that is the way we're going to move forward, right? We have to have mass mobilization. And there are people already on the ground. But you can also see how mass mobilization happens so quickly with

where people have never been in the street and they're in the street and they're just getting turned on. And they're building on the work that has already been done and people that have been doing over the past couple of years, whether it's Black Lives Matter or Indigenous Folk, you know, whatever. I was going to say out in, say, you know, the West, but even, you know, here also as well in the East. I think it's super important for us to understand the future is built on the work that people are already doing and for us to how to keep that

plugged in to mass mobilization. Absolutely. So on that note, I want to thank you for making the time to have this conversation and to wish you well in these pandemic times. You too. Stay safe. You too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

This is another episode of In Conversation, brought to you by Network Reorient, the podcast arm of Critical Muslim Studies. Thank you for tuning in. Have a listen to our other episodes and please leave a like and a rating.