Post-Publication Dispatch: Islamophobia, Balkan Zionism and the Countours of Disciplines
Last November, I toured Europe to present my latest books and research. I was warmly welcomed by colleagues and many students who expressed great interest in reaching out to me and reading my latest publications. I had extremely thought-provoking conversations with students and attendees, particularly in Warsaw and Sofia. Since then, I have not refrained from (over)thinking about some epistemic dissonance that emerged from my presentations.
Beyond Islamophobia: Islamophobia was understood as a concern “only for Muslims”. Although I tried (and perhaps failed) to show how mechanisms of Islamophobia operate similarly in other forms of scapegoating against minoritised and racialised communities – be they Roma, Jews, migrants, and LGBTQIA+ – most students could not fully grasp my words. This confusion made me think of the containerisation of university programs and courses, where both teachers and students narrow down on specific theories/methodologies without engaging enough with interdisciplinarity. It also reminded me of a conversation I had with the director of the Department of Social Sciences in a German city*, who shared with me her disappointment over the rigid approach to disciplines (and their methodologies) that has gained ground in German academia. In another monograph, I quoted François Lyotard’s words, which are here worth recalling:
“Traditional approaches are nowadays in danger of being incorporated into the programming of the social whole as a simple tool for the optimisation of its performance; this is because its desire for a unitary and totalising truth lends itself to the unitary and totalising protection of the system’s managers” (1983: 12).
For a while, I had thought that decolonising the curricula had eventually become an affirmative action undertaken by the (collapsing) university system of Western academia. I still believe that social scientists are increasingly reshaping the explanatory frameworks of the fields they support. And this is why, despite the tokenism, decolonising the curricula could enrich the ways students navigate and engage with different areas of knowledge, stimulating them to move beyond the contours of a given discipline and thereby understand the limits of “what they study”.
Looking inward? Policymakers and civil society practitioners attended my presentations. Throughout, I felt they struggled to come to terms with “internalised Islamophobia” – an issue that often traps progressive and left-leaning minds as well. I pointed out that Muslims in and from the Balkans may speak badly about “other Muslims” in an attempt to yearn to present themselves as “fully Europeans”. Some do so unconsciously as they have internalised the age-old and lasting Eurocentric vision of Islam. Others simply reiterate their ethno-nationalist views – all embedded in the coloniality of being, performing, and catching up with (the history of) Europeanness. And yet, policymakers and civil society practitioners were unable to connect the dots. When I mention studies that explain this eye-opening phenomenon – from Achille Mbembe to Dženita Karić, Piro Rexhepi, and Monika Bobako – students did very little about it. A bit better with quoting Edward Said, though. Similar to university academia, the field of policy is in need of an epistemic decolonisation, especially in relation to the history of intra-European migration and socialism’s anti-imperialism that, behind the cloak of altruism and decolonialisation, came to racialize “backward” and darker-skinned Muslims who could not benefit from a socialist, classless society.
Beyond Gaza: When discussing the reverberations of the genocidal violence from Gaza to the post-socialist generations in and from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Bulgaria – whose (grand)parents survived genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing from the late 1980s to the 1990s – many students did not know much about such appalling histories. Sure, they knew about the siege of Sarajevo and the NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia. Still, they were also completely unaware of the mechanisms that led to the genocide in Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of Turks and Muslims in Bulgaria, among others. This lack of knowledge led me to reconsider the curricula at both the school and university levels once again. How much Eurocentrism is present in them, and how many ontologies, histories, and political experiences are de facto erased from the official circuit of knowledge production and dissemination in and beyond academia. And yet, this is an issue “only for students”. After my lecture in Sofia, I thought of how many journalists and leading “intellectuals” depicted Russia’s merciless attack on Ukrainians of February 2022 as the “return of war in Europe”. Really? Ukraine fell under Russia’s occupation in 2014, while Europe was already torn apart by the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s.
The Zionist Within: At times, activists spiced up the conversation. In Sofia, the audience was taken by surprise when I showed a photo of the Maccabi Club – the first Zionist group in Bulgaria. I argued that the history of Balkan Zionism is embedded in the history of nationalist/decolonial projects of the “Bulgarian Revitalists” of the late nineteenth century. By then, a few had already left the room. Others did not follow my reasoning when I described “Palestine as a microcosm”; a microcosm through which we can understand our societies better – I quoted Andreas Malm and Francesca Albanese here. What Gaza is today is not the distorted and/or dystopic picture of war, but rather the brutalism of our societies, as well as the complicity and vested interests of our governments in the killing fields.
* I here prefer to anonymise the place and the person I met in Germany.
