Liberal Condemnation of Islamophobia VS Socialist Critique of Orientalism: Do Western Minorities Have Anything to Say to the Global Majority? 

Fakhry Al-Serdawi

September 11, 2026

After Slavoj Žižek described multiculturalism as a “legalistic liberal dream,” he retold a story conveyed to him by Udi Aloni about a Palestinian rapper who gave a concert at UCLA, where one of his songs condemned honor killings of Palestinian women, and for that he was attacked by anti-Zionists because they deemed this served the purposes of Zionism. The rapper replied: “The difference between you and me is that you study in one of the richest universities and you talk this way to guarantee your career to become popular with your wealthy, with your pseudo-radical professors in English, while I, in my country, think in Hebrew and Arab to help women who really suffer there.” [1] At the end, Žižek concludes that some Palestinians proclaim that while yes they are going through an anti-Zionist struggle, we have many problems of our own, like honor killings.

Žižek’s opinion has several issues. First, he removes the burden of fulfilling the liberal legalistic dream of multiculturalism from America and Europe to Israel and Palestine by essentially defending the framework of intersectionality, an integral component of the academic left’s multicultural project, demanding therefore a Palestinian project for multiculturalism under the Israeli occupation. Second, he provides a populist description of the political economy of the academic left's radicalism, but he does not tackle the radicalism of the Palestinian rapper in the same way. In any given context, there are three types of managerialisms: solid governmental, malleable non-governmental, and liquid managerialism in humanities academia, art, and media. Both the Palestinian rapper and his anti-Zionist academia belong to the same liquid managerial class.

Third, as Žižek considers that such activists are trying to prioritize cultural difference over human rights, he conflates, as a result, liberal condemnation of islamophobia (the main subject of this essay) with anti-Zionist critique of Palestinian liberalism (aside from the fact that honor killings are a violation of Islamic doctrine). Muslims in Europe and America who demand respect for their assumption of extreme cultural difference under both multiculturalism and freedom of religion, in a way that might also contradict human rights, are either citizens of liberal democracies or have legal means to access this citizenship (sometimes even for irregular immigrants), Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, nor do they have access to such citizenship; therefore, both the defense and the criticism of whatever constitutes Palestinian cultural difference is a bourgeois luxury. 

Anti-Zionist critics of Palestinian liberalism should not be completely dismissed, as they understand the cul-de-sac nature of Palestinian liberal self-critique and because they understand that liberal and illiberal Israeli elites, managing the Israeli capitalist state, operate on a level similar to Democratic Party elites, especially between 2016 and 2024. Just as Democrats embrace the pessimism that American society will never overcome racism, sexism, and homophobia, the Israeli elite and its Zionist allies in America (in Tablet Magazine, The Free Press) also have a nihilistic perspective on how surrounding Arab societies will never overcome mistreatment of religious minorities, patriarchy, and anti-semitism.

Žižek is right on a basic level when he says that: “multiculturalism relies on a certain liberal legalistic dream, which simply doesn’t work. The idea is each community can maintain, if it wants — of course it can also mix others — its own way of life; the state just has to guarantee peaceful coexistence without violence.” But the problem is that he thinks that liberalism is the antidote to multiculturalism, or more precisely, liberal condemnation of Islam is the antidote to the liberal condemnation of islamophobia. Thus, he disregards the evidence of a symbiotic relationship between the liberal moral panic over Islam and its similar moral panic over islamophobia.

The social scientific methodology of connecting the two is useful, first, because the critique of the liberal critique of Islam is much more potent than the critique of islamophobia, as the latter is particular and based on morality and the former is universal and based on the critique of class ideology (even if such liberal critique is correct and not conventionally islamophobic), and second, by criticizing the liberal critique of islamophobia necessarily as part of criticizing liberalism as a whole, including the strand of liberalism morally outraged by Islamic cultural difference, one can arm the critics of multiculturalism with much better analytical tools.

Liberal condemnation of either Islam or islamophobia shares the same historical roots within the failures of the 20th century. In his 1989 book about Eurocentrism, Samir Amin said that: “Our era is characterized by culturalist evasions as much in the West, where they take the form of praise for provincialism, as in the Third World, where they are expressed by the wave of fundamentalisms…The provincial reaction is not exclusive to Westerners. Capitalist ideology remains dominant on the world scale. This reaction, therefore, finds expression at the periphery of the system as well, where it appears in the inverted forms of non-European nationalist culturalisms. There, too, it is an ineffective response to the challenge at hand.” [2]

This end-of-the-20th-century cultural provincialism is not only manifested in the vulgar expression of identity in the form of racism and religious fundamentalism, but in the liberal critiques against such expressions; both the liberal critique of Islam and the liberal critique of islamophobia relapse under late capitalism into new cultural provincialisms. This also includes the proclaimed liberal self-critique. If there is an Orwellian, barbarizing phenomenon in contemporary discourse, it would be white liberals' or Muslim liberals' self-critique. Both seem like the work of true and courageous critical thinkers, attempting to reach out to the other side, adopting the comedy social rules in American culture where each one examines their own identity group, when in fact Muslim self-critique produces a discourse that enables neoconservative civilizational essentialism and racism, and white self-critique produces a discourse that also enables the civilizational essentialism of non-white fundamentalisms, including those related to Muslim identity.

Today, 25 years after 9/11, there is no space within this essay to highlight in detail how, within contemporary history, the liberal condemnation of Islam has relapsed into reactionary identity politics. Yet it is important to reject the argument that, unlike their opponents, the critics of Islam are not a mainstream force in society. Proclamations of being among the unique -and besieged- contrarians are part of self-marketing and self-legitimization of any public-debate group.

It would be interesting to produce a separate essay on the history and the political economy of Islam-skeptics, and how they have gone a long way from the days of the pro-Iraq War New Atheist movement of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitiches, Douglas Murray, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider and the ex-Muslims of North America to their ideas becoming a mainstream power through the anti-immigration movement in Europe through new media outlets like Unherd Magazine (once again, even the title of the magazine claims an unfounded uniqueness). This includes the anti-Sharia bloc in the Republican Party and the philosophical academic right in Compact Magazine and other conservative outlets who ironically import foreign anti-immigration ideas from Europe to raise alarm on Islamic difference despite the obvious dissimilarities between these two contexts, and import the ideas of civilizational conflict from Israel, through the Heritage Foundation’s National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, or Project Esther, which tries to make the case that Israeli nationalism is synonyms with American patriotism, and critique of Israel is not only a “threat” to American Jews, but to America as a whole, and condemns Jewish American “complacency” and “indifference” to face such threat. [3]

This essay will therefore focus on providing an account of how the liberal condemnation of islamophobia also came to be a significant form of cultural provincialism, especially in that either the left denies such provincialism or the right sluggishly and melodramatically establishes it as a given fact (by declaring the death of the Western university) without describing the history and the political economy of such a phenomenon.

The term islamophobia has imperial etymological roots, in the 1910s and in the 1920s, when French orientalists and anthropologists urged the French colonial administration to avoid hostility towards Islam, in order to consolidate a more liberal version of French colonial rule. [4] Yet, it was until the late 1990s that the term became widespread in the public debate when the British Commission on Muslims and Islamophobia and the British Race Relations NGO Runnymede Trust proposed a definition of islamophobia [5], and since then, the liberal attitude against islamophobia has constructed a solid, malleable, but especially liquid managerial class in the West for studying and fighting islamophobia, which is a subsection of the overall Western political economy for tolerance, multiculturalism, anti-racism and decoloniality.

In the last two decades, the political economy of Islamophobia Studies spanned across several academic-managerial settings, from the general Prejudice Studies such as the late John Esposito at the Bridge Initiative at (the Saudi) Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Wolfgang Benz at the Berlin Center for Anti-Semitism Studies, to Post-Colonial Studies and Critical Race Theory at the biannual Islamophobia Studies Conference organized by Farid Hafez from the University of Salzburg, who is also the editor of the Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, to the Decolonial Studies at the the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley administered by Hatem Bazian. [6] 

Examining islamophobia through the liberal methodologies of prejudice studies and the critique of anti-Muslim racism is riddled with the same epistemological defects regarding the study of discrimination against any ethnic, religious, and sexual minority group in the West (almost identical to the epistemological crisis of antisemitism studies). Erik Bleich, for example, considers contemporary evidence on islamophobia to be “indirect, anecdotal, or conflating,” especially the Muslim middle class’s own responses to perceptions of islamophobia; this is why he concludes that “It may not be possible to develop a meaningful aggregate index of Islamophobia given the currently available data.” [7]

But there is a whole set of different epistemological issues in approaching islamophobia under decolonial theory. In his comprehensive anthropological essay about the critique of decolonization, Wilson Trajano Filho explains how North American universities, especially since the 1990s, have elite-captured Subaltern Studies from India and Decolonial Studies from Latin America (with all their radical rigor) [8], North American islamophobia studies, especially within the context of the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, would engage in a parallel process, this time creating the figure of the muslim subaltern, and calling for the project of muslim decoloniality.

Decolonial academia sees itself not as an educational project (as is post-colonial academia) but as an interventionist, political project. Therefore, Islamic cultural difference is not only defended, but also encouraged and revered as one of the many foundations for an intersectional liberation process, against a Coloniality of Power, “an intersectionality of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation” under a “capitalist/patriarchal western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system.” [9]

Decoloniality causes islamophobia to become completely unmeasurable. It is not clear how the reaffirmation of Muslim and other decolonial identities would lead to the collective liberation of the global majority; decolonial academia does not even bother to offer empirical evidence of its transition to praxis outside of campus, although it never stops from declaring itself as more than theory. On the contrary, the symbiotic relationship between the liberal condemnation of islamophobia and the liberal condemnation of Islam reaches new levels through the performative simulation of “epistemic decolonization,” “epistemic disobedience” and defense of the subaltern against "epistemic violence," with the irony of this terminology becoming co-opted by the populist right to play the same game but from the opposite perspective, creating new public-debate cosplayers who claim that the Western university is engaging in an attack against “Western civilization.”

All strands of islamophobia studies are then Western theories preoccupied with a Western minority. Decolonial islamophobia studies differ from anti-racist and prejudice studies in creating a niche rhetoric about representing the global majority, while not diverting much from the intersectional domestic framework of liberal parties in North America and Western Europe (aside from symbolic expressions of solidarity with the Global South). Liberal condemnation of islamophobia (as liberal condemnation of Islam) becomes a political tool for capitalist management parties to induce mass depoliticization in public life. In 2019, a year after the midterms and before the presidential elections, Lebanese writer Amer Moshen prophetically explained: 

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar courageously champions immigrants and minorities, yet she fails to link their struggle with that of the poor "white man"; instead, she contributes to pitting them against one another—with the Democratic Party establishment "speaking for" the former, while Republicans monopolize the latter. Politically, it leads nowhere; in fact, it is precisely what Trump desires at this juncture (as Jamal Ghosn argues, Ilhan Omar’s primary role in American politics may well be that she—single-handedly—secures Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term). In any case, history shows that if the "poor American" and the "poor immigrant" were to truly connect and unite… the outcome would be terrifying for Ilhan Omar’s party, its intellectuals, and its liberal left. [10]

The anti-islamophobia liquid managerialism is assisting in the reproduction of such a political and societal divide. Moe Amer’s segment on the Today Show, was just another famous Person of Color saying the perfect feelgood set of phrases that would make white liberals happy about themselves, mainly by lambasting the white American working class as ignorant and stupid — a generalization of the actions of few extremists — before lecturing them how Muslims believe in Jesus Christ, how there is whole chapter in the Quran named after his mother Marry, before accusing them of being upset at Muslims being “Doctors, engineers, lawyers.” [11] Unlike the theme of the hopeless humility in accepting the death of the American Dream in the TV show Widow’s Bay, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, another TV show about a coastal island that represents a small version of America, annoyingly and consistently stops itself to explain and draw comparisons between its noble Muslim character and its dishonest, rude, and fanatic Catholic characters.

Aside from its attitude about the local majority, the contemporary history of the Democratic Party around the Palestinian question, proves that liberal condemnation of islamophobia is about the domestic (resident and incoming) niche minority, not the global majority. Lama Abu Odeh brilliantly explains how, within the Party, the depoliticizing effect of the condemnation of domestic anti-Muslim hatred was used to replace authentic change in Middle East foreign policy. [12] The critique of Republican islamophobia and xenophobia was facilitated while the critique of Israel was constantly impeded, even during the post-2018 era of the Squad and Rashida Tlaib. Hilary Clinton is a stark example of a pro-Israel critic of islamophobia, as she praised George Bush in 2015 for standing up against anti-Muslim hate, while in 2025 she would describe negative views on Israel during the War as generated by an organized effort of disinformation and propaganda. [13]

The Muslim liberal defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejecting the offer of Marjorie Taylor Greene to form a bipartisan front against Israel is very telling. There are many good reasons to criticize Greene, particularly her anti-semitism, but the way those liberals are doing it shows how much they are burdened by anti-imperialism and are harkening to the much simpler times of the 2016 Culture War and to anti-Trump, anti-fascism discourse. Mehdi Hassan, for example, made a cartoonish segment on how AOC, like a straight-A student, did her homework on Gaza while Greene did not. [14] (Look at Gaza, did anybody do their job?)

Many would describe Gaza as the new moralistic and symbolic issue for the Democratic Socialists of America, but the direct correlation between the DSA prioritizing working-class domestic issues like never before and openly criticizing Israel like never before is too great to be ignored. Of course, one should not disregard the fact that the DSA does support multiculturalism and does condemn islamophobia, and it is yet to be confirmed whether Zohran Mamadani and Abdul El-Sayed are socialists with an occasional identity politics card or identity politicians with an occasional socialist card. Away from the New-Deal-Phobic criticism of the DSA, the fact that Mamadani and Al-Sayed have accepted socialism means they automatically have embraced universalism and rejected Islamic cultural provincialism.

Paradoxically, the more leftists have something meaningful to say for the majority in their own country, the more they have something meaningful to say to the global majority. The liberal elite's capture of minority politics was designed to undermine both local and international self-determination. The only difference about the liberal defense of Islamic cultural difference is that it seems more authentic than the liberal defense of women and queers. But in reality, such a defense of Islamic identity did not start with Hilary Clinton and George Bush, but one might argue was constructed on a massive scale during the Cold War’s project to separate the Islamic World as a distinct entity from Eurasia.

It is not a surprise that in the 1950s, that India (the home of subaltern theory) was disliked by American Diplomats, who described Indian non-alignment with Egypt’s Nasser and Yugoslavia’s Tito as a result of  “effeminate, passive, and indecisive” Hinduism, unlike Islam which is “manly, energetic, and tough-minded in the face of the Communist threat.” [15] Islamism had a long record of preformative cultural hostility coupled with a strategic political alliance with the West, from USAID funded curricula in Afghanistan that “counterbalance Marxism through creating enthusiasm in Islamic militancy” [16], to G7 governments supporting Islamists in Algeria, Egypt, and Baathist Iraq in the 1980–1990s [17], to Syria becoming the darling of Islamic liberation theology after 2011, in a way that coincided with the national interests of the US, Israel and several other European governments. 

This process of separating the Islamic World from Eurasia has been going in parallel with two other processes: separating the Jews from West Asia through Zionist Ideology, and separating Europe as an artificial continent from Eurasia through Atlantist ideology. Decolonial theory adds its little touch of separating the Muslims from their inter-civilizational landmass, in a way that gives them a license to remove themselves entirely from the reality of their West Eurasian region with its long history of proximate interaction and contestation with Europe. In his article “Arabs and the discourse of victimhood: Is it time to break free from identifying with the "periphery" and the "margin"?” Syrian academic Fadi Abu Deeb, said that the Arabs, through decolonial methodology, ended up viewing themselves as an imagined community of victims equal to the far-away South Asian Indians, and the far-away indigenous South Americans and Oceanians. [18]

It is easy to blame Edward Said for how we got here. But Said did not invent the liberal condemnation of islamophobia. Jewish South African writer Benita Parry even argued that he never accepted his designation as the father of post-colonial theory. [19] In his 1980 article about the Palestine Question in the American context, he openly embraced the constitutional values and design of the American Republic “since its inception.” [20] Contrary to the belief of the liberal critics of Islam, Said’s ideas did not win; certain hermeneutics and interpretations of his theory in the age of identity politics did win. Therefore, there is an actual-existing unknown parallel history of Said’s work going in a substantially different direction, not convenient to the rhetorics of the liberal critics of Islam and the liberal critics of islamophobia, that of the Eurasian-Socialist Critique of Orientalism.

Said’s book Orientalism was produced under very specific historical developments: first, the (apparent) success of the reconstruction of the wealthy and secular Europe and West Germany in the 1970s, a mere generation after Nazi catastrophe. Second, the Arab Defeat in the 1967 War by Israel, something that created a totalized regional historical structure in which the Middle East still lives, and third, the fall of the Soviet Union, which created a parallel totalized historical structure globally.

Under these historical conditions, a dissident Socialist Critique of Orientalism, with an insistence on Eurasian Unity, gained modest momentum. First, through the Arab-Marxist radical critique of Said himself, which did not deflate but actually enhanced the critique of Orientalism, though Syrian Marxist Sadeq Jalal Al-Azem, who coined the term “Reverse-Orientalism,” the opposite phenomenon of the glorification of the East, which is the main intellectual basis of the liberal condemnation of islamophobia, to Lebanese Marxist Mehdi Amel, who criticized Said for his interpretation of Marx’s writing on India, to Samir Amin, who wrote the aforementioned book Eurocentrism, a founding document in this school of thought.

This other critique of Orientalism was not only centered around an anti-imperialist question, but a post-imperialist question, the one in the aftermath of 1917; in the absence of the Russian, Ottoman, Astro-Hungarian empires, how do East European, Balkan, Central Asian, Levantine Arab societies find new progressive modes of mass social organization, while facing the benign and malignant effects of a mass industrial and post-industrial society in North-Western Europe, with uneven development in South, Central and Eastern Europe the site of victory over fascism and later on communism (with the creation of the post-Holocaust moralistic society in Germany), and the effects of mass industrial and post-industrial society in North America, with uneven development in the near South, the site of victory over Confederate semi-feudalism (with the creation of the post-Atlantic slave trade moralistic society in North America after 1968)? The Socialist critique of Orientalism does not necessarily view the West as an oppressor, but as what Jean Baudrillard described as a “depressurizing of the West in the void of communism, in the void of history.” [21]

The Socialist Critique of Orientalism also recognizes the role of Stalinism in its impediment of the creation of a universal culture through the proto-Stalinist institutions of Soviet Oriental Studies (Red Orientalism) and the 1922 Baku conference, which institutionalized Soviet pessimism over social change in Western Europe, one that was replaced with the first massive bureaucratized introduction of Reverse-orientalism, the idea that the inherent cultural and civilizational superiority of the East, which makes it a superior environment for the establishment of Socialism. [22] This kind of tendency can be traced way back before the problematic interwar industrialization of the Soviet Union, but to Western and Central European romantic response to industrialization in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. [23]

This is where we can find the other critique of Orientalism and the other disciples of Said and others instinctively relevant to his theory, from the critique of Euro-Orientalism by Ezequil Adamovsky [24] and Eric Wolff, to the critique of the European disdain of the Post-Soviet Orient or Neo-Orientalism by Michal Buchowski [25], to the Critique of Balkanism by Maria Todorova and Katherine Elizabeth Feliming, to the inclusion of the critique of Orientalism into antisemitism and Jewish studies by Ivan Kalmar, Ivan Kalman, Derek Penslar (Said included the critique of anti-Jewish attitudes in his discipline-founding book), to the Catholic critique of the Occidentalism of the affluent international class and its totalized attack on conservative society (analogous to its attack on oriental society) by Agosto del Noce. [26]

British academic Chris Hann is to be highlighted here, as he adds to the discipline the concept of Eurasian unity as the antidote to the Eurocentric paradigm, which, contrary to decoloniality, refreshingly includes Europe and Europeans in the process of universal social progress; this is where the Socialist critique of Orientalism becomes very important. For Hann, Eurasia is a discourse but also is historical material fact grounded in reality. [27]  Hann here says “Yes, we are the children of the past 500 years, but we are also heirs of much older interactions between the human economy and the religious-political nexus, dating back in the Old World at least 3,000 years” [28], especially that “Industrial society and its principal container, the nation state, were born little more than two centuries ago” [29], and since then the unity of Eurasia becomes denied by Western scholarship through the myth of the “European miracle.” [30] The separation of Europe from Eurasia would appear at the same historical juncture with the separation of bourgeois society and its bureaucratic state from society as whole by the mid 1800s, which led to the reaction of Marxism. 

Hann cites economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi to indicate the main two foundations of Eurasian unity: first, an intercivilizational connectivity in the Eurasian land mass that was only interrupted in recent history, and second, a view on the dialectic between community and individual, redistribution and market that prioritizes community over the self-regulating market, an ideology applied on a vast scale since the Axial Age [31], with the appearance of complex societies and moral systems of thought between the 8th and 3rd centuries B.C, in Greek, Jewish, Persian and Indian societies (which was a precursor to Christian and Islamic community-oriented Societies in upcoming ages). The civilization-building ideas of community welfare, or Oikos, were set by Aristotle and Confucius. [32] It is until the crisis of industrial-imperial, market-oriented society in the 19th century that Marx would appear, and after the World Wars and the Fascism of the first half of the 20th century, attempts at tilting the dialectic towards the welfare state again in New Deal America, Social-Democrat Western Europe, and on a grand scale in Eurasia through Marxism-Leninism are considered as a continuity in the Eurasian longue durée. [33] Of course this continued until the 1980s, with the reappearance of the market society again, this time, with a more self-aware endless set of religious, ethnic, racial, sexual identities.

Eurasian unity is a quasi-universal ideology (certainly much more universal than European unity), one that necessitates the equally quasi-universal socialist critique of orientalism. Unlike the liberal condemnation of islamophobia, such critique does not single out Muslims as a definite, final, and closed identity, but critiques the attitudes of industrial society and post-industrial society towards all of different nationalities and religions in Eurasia, including Jews. While giving Muslims the responsibility not to collide and to conspire with industrial society against other religions and ethnicities under the myth of Reverse or Positive-Orientalism. 

One can then apply Hann’s methodology to the critique of the Atlanticist notion of “Fortress Europe” [34], to “Fortress Zionism” or the neoconservative notion of "Fortress Judeo-Christianity” on one hand, and the notion of the separateness of the “Islamic World” through “Reverse-Orientalism” on the other hand. In that sense, Muslims are part of Eurasian unity,  especially since they have been a part of the multiethnic Levantine, Balkan, and Russian/Central Asian societies; they have always prioritized community welfare as the basis for civilization, especially since Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd were influenced by Aristotle. Also, Muslims, as Marshall Hodgson argued, helped to expand Eurasia to become Afro­‐Eurasia. [35]

The critique of Islam and the critique of Muslims failed and were elite-captured. But what cannot be appropriated is the critique of Muslim capitalist society. In that, the Muslim bourgeoisie simply do not have the right or the choice to think of themselves as superior to their compatriots in the Eurasian home. If Jews at least have the Jewish Labour Bund, an essential manifestation of the Eurasian dream, what do we have aside from anti-communist state-capitalism? Late-capitalist (sometimes Salafi) ultra-identitarianism? And not only Islamic political violence, but the worst and the stupidest kind: US government-sponsored Islamic political violence? [36]

And now, the directorship of the professoriate in North America and the Aljazeera left are telling us what to hear to stay stuck in our closed identity. How come Shahid Bolsen, an American Muslim convert, is for radical cultural anti-imperialism, considering white-Christians to be inherently inferior to Muslims, while embracing the imperialism of the capitalist transnational class, arguing that such a class believes that the future is for Muslims because they are “inherently better”? [37]

Such attitudes do not lead to a notion of Islamic or Arab unity; on the contrary, they lead to endless processes of othering within the Middle East, from what Syrian writer Yassin Saleh Al-Haj described as nihilistic deafated pan-arabists, tailing Islamic powers like Iran and Turkey [38], to the idea of a Fortress Arabian Peninsula, propped up by Donald Trump during his first term in the guise of an Arab NATO [39], which intensified the separation of the conservative and rich societies of Arab Gulf monarchies from their region and built the idea that they are also inherently superior, creating what could be described as Khaliji Orientalism, the idea that Peninsular Arabs are the winners of the post-Arab Spring era because their culture is metaphysically better (not because of their countries position in the world system), in comparison to the supposed civilizational backwardness of the  societies of Arab republics in West Asia and Africa, the losers of such era because of their abandonment of conservative native Arab forms of governance. [40]

The kernel of truth of all religious systems of thought is that religious identity does not automatically grant a person closeness to God, but actual constant contact with God through malevolent labor. The Quran verse (Al-Hujurat: 13) mentions vast human differences between tribes and nations, before affirming that no identity matters; on the contrary, what matters is personal accountability before God. In that sense, closed identities are not a journey into the divine but a form of ethnocentrism in the Post-Religious age, characterized by the death of genuine religiosity and its replacement with making money and affirming one's superficial identity. [41]

In the fields of multiculturalism, plurinationalism, and migration, my Mexican professor Arturo Mota Rodríguez talks about analogical hermeneutics of measuring difference, to see oneself not only as a self but as an other, in order to avoid the two forms of losing oneself in modern capitalist society: first, the loss of one’s identity before the decadence of capitalist society; second, the loss of oneself in their closed identity. [42]

Malcolm X has a fascinating story of negotiating his autonomy before different identity politics. First he was disenchanted with the Nation of Islam and its interpretation of Islam in favor of radical cultural and preformative black identitarianism, and then he was disenchanted with the Islamic Identity of the Muslim Brotherhood established powerful Muslim World League, after seeing that Islamism “was not the solution to the problems of black people,” all while maintaining that Islam has prevented him from relapsing to an absolute notion of black identity when he said “It is only being a Muslim… which keeps me from seeing people by the color of their skin.” [43] The checks and balances between his two identities kept Malcolm X from becoming totally consumed by one. 

With the current crisis of capitalism, a modest number of young Muslims in America are turning to socialism, like Izdihar Baily, who celebrates the history of socialist Muslims in the Soviet Union. This is not another plot against America as neoconservatives would claim, but an invitation to go beyond the market of identity politics and cultural provincialism in a market-oriented society; an acceptance of such an invitation by American civil society is yet to take place in the collective struggle against the American political elites.

Vulgar Eurocentrism appeared in the late 20th century to provide facile cultural explanations for the failure of socio-economic development in most parts of the world. Anti-racist, postcolonial, and decolonial theories were self-defense mechanisms that glorified pre-capitalist cultures and blamed a notion of Eurocentric epistemology for the failure of socio-economic development on a global scale, while magically claiming that on-campus radicalism can solve all problems in the world.

This academia failed to connect the dots between three world events which have formed the modern phenomenon that Michal Buchowski calls Neo-Orientalism. The first world event is the fall of the Soviet Union which created the post-Soviet lumpenproletariat in Eastern Europe, the orphans of the collective farm. The second world event is 9/11 and the migration crisis which made the world stumble upon the Muslim lumpenproletariat. The third world event is the election of Trump in 2016 after the complete deindustrialization of America, not different in its historical form from the desovietization of Eurasia, which created the American lumpenproletariat, or what Hillary Clinton called “the Basket of Deplorables.” [44]

Hatred for Muslims is not unique in that it represents hatred of the bourgeoisie for the workers and the hatred of the workers for the peasants. Buchowski used the analysis of Neo-Orientalism in the post-Soviet space to predict the rise of populism under globalization. He argues that the postmodern, postindustrial, and postsocialist meanings of orientalism have moved the bourgeoisie from a preoccupation with the Other to a preoccupation to the Stigmatized Brother. No longer are we talking about the difference between the “civilized” West and the “uncivilized” East, but we have reached the abstract class politics of difference between “urban vs. rural, educated vs. uneducated, and winners vs. losers of transformation” [45], basically the difference between the “Gentlemen and the Mob.” [46]

What happened in America after the 2008 financial crisis is familiar to any observer of history. Just like Muslims in the 2000s and Eastern Europeans in the 1990s, the American working class in the 2010s needed to be culturally reeducated or perish. This has failed, just as the subsequent Victimhood Eurocentrism and Victimhood American Exceptionalism of the 2020s failed at the hands of Trump and his ilk. The ultimate truth that everyone should reckon with is that the Global South's failure of development has hit Global North societies; this must be an opportunity for solidarity. The whole world is the Third World now, and the American working class (including the white and Christian working class) needs the rest of humanity, and the rest of humanity needs it too.

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[1] Žižek, Slavoj. (2017) “Islam and Multiculturalism.” YouTube video of lecture.

[2] Amin, S. (1989). Eurocentrism. Monthly Review Press, p.200.

[3] Heritage Foundation. (2024). Project Esther: A national strategy to combat antisemitism. The Heritage Foundation.

[4] Skenderovic, D., & Späti, C. (2019). From Orientalism to Islamophobia: Reflections, Confirmations, and Reservations. ReOrient, 4(2), p.134.

[5] Bleich, E. (2012). Defining and Researching Islamophobia. Review of Middle East Studies, 46(2), p.179.

[6] Hafez, F. (2018). Schools of Thought in Islamophobia Studies: Prejudice, Racism, and Decoloniality. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 4(2), 210–225.

[7] Bleich. Op Cit. p.184.

[8] Filho, W. T. (2024). On decolonization and its correlates. Anuário Antropológico, 49(1), 66–116.

[9] Hafez, F. Op Cit. p.219.

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[17] Amin, S. Op Cit, p. 83.

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[21] Buchowski, M. (2006). Social Thought & Commentary: The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. Anthropological Quarterly, 79(3), p.477.

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[25] Buchowski, M. (2006). Social Thought & Commentary: The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. Anthropological Quarterly, 79(3), Page 470-472.

[26] Del Noce, A. (1989). Marxism died in the East because it realized itself in the West. Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame.

[27] Hann, C. (2017). Multiscalar Narrative Identities: Individual And Nation, Europe And Eurasia. Politeja, 49, p.25.

[28] Hann, C., Benovska-Sabkova, M., Bošković, A., Eriksen, T. H., Gellner, D. N., Gingrich, A., Kradin, N., de Pina-Cabral, J., Ribeiro, G. L., Rogers, D., Schlee, G., Skalník, P., & Wengrow, D. (2016). A Concept of Eurasia. Current Anthropology, 57(1), p.7.

[29] Hann, C. (2016). p.4.

[30] Hann, C. (2017). Op. Cit, p.29.

[31] Hann, C. (2016). Op. Cit, p.8.

[32] Ibidem, p.8.

[33] Hann, C. (2017). Op. Cit, p.32.

[34] Ibidem,  p.15.

[35] Ibidem, p.26.

[36] I am highly skeptical of the terms “terrorism” and “jihadism” because I follow the scientific methodology of critical terrorism studies.

[37] Middle Nation (2023). “Shahid Bolsen on the Inferiority of Western Values” YouTube video posted by Middle Nation.

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[42] Mota Rodríguez, A. (2018). Analogical hermeneutics, migration and cultural identity. Studium. Filosofía Y Teología, 21(41), 67–92.

[43] Curtis, E. E. (2007). Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics: Black Muslims in the Era of the Arab Cold War. American Quarterly, 59(3), 683–709.

[44] Time Staff. (2016). Read Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remarks. Time.

[45] Buchowski, M. Op Cit. p.466.

[46] Ibidem, p.470.