A „klasszikus” szociológia dekolonizálása felé: Max Weber eurocentrikus világtörténetének földrajzi kritikája

Fotó: https://www.thoughtco.com/max-weber-relevance-to-sociology-3026500

Max Weber gazdaságtörténeti és vallásszociológiai elemzéseiben széles körű áttekintést adott arról a nagy kérdésről, hogy miért éppen a „Nyugat” emelkedett ki a világtörténelem során. Híres hipotézise szerint a protestáns aszkézisben fellelhető gazdasági magatartásokra vezethető vissza, hogy végső soron „a Nyugaton, és csakis a Nyugat talaján” jöhetett létre a „racionális” kultúrán alapuló modern kapitalizmus. Ezzel szemben „Keleten” ennek hiánya tapasztalható: egész történelme során irracionalitás, gazdasági stagnálás és ún. orientális despotizmus uralkodott. Habár írt a konfucianizmusról, illetve a hindu és a zsidó vallásról, addig a kereszténységhez hasonlóan monoteista iszlámról tervezett nagy munkája sosem készülhetett el. A hazai társadalomtudományok azonban nem vettek tudomást Weber protestáns etikára visszavezetett, ideáltipikus kapitalista „szellemének” földrajzi alapjairól, holott ezek a weberi életmű fontos „preszociológiai” előfeltételezéseit képezték. Az előadás célja egyrészt bemutatni Weber hipotézisének földrajzi állításait, másrészt kritika alá vetni globális összehasonlító elemzéseinek eurocentrikus földrajzi képzeletét, és végül felfedni a korabeli geopolitikai, gyarmatbirodalmi viszonyokba ágyazódó társadalomtudományi tudástermelés diskurzív alapjait és ellentmondásait. Weber „progresszív Nyugat” és „merev Kelet” orientalista dichotómiájának dekonstruálása végül kiegészül az iszlámról közölt nézeteinek rövid áttekintésével és néhány politikai gazdasági példával is, rámutatva a gyarmatosításnak és az egyes régiók közötti globális kereskedelem történelmi hegemóniaviszonyainak elfedésére, valamint az orientális despotizmus és a keleti „bezárkózó” gazdaságok eurocentrikus mítoszaira. Az előadás célja ezzel a nemzetközi szakirodalomban jól ismert globális történetírás, valamint a posztkoloniális és dekoloniális megközelítések alapján a „klasszikus” szociológia tudáskánonjának dekolonizált olvasatát sürgetni.

Towards decolonizing “classical” sociology: The geographical critique of Max Weber’s eurocentric world history

In his economic history and sociology of religion, Max Weber presented an expansive account on the big question, why was it the “West” that emerged as dominant in world history. According to his famous hypothesis, ascetic Protestantism was the insufficient ingredient to why “in the West and only on Western soil” could the “rational” culture of modern capitalism evolve. In contrast, the “East” was only home to a range of absences: irrationality, economic stagnation and so-called oriental despotism reigned throughout its whole history. Although Weber had written on Confucianism, the Hindu and Jewish religions, his vast study on Islam, also a monotheism as Christianism, was never to be finished in full. However, Hungarian social sciences and the humanities did not pay any attention to the geographical foundations of Weber’s capitalist “spirit” and its supposed origins in the Protestant ethic, despite these being important “presociological” conceptions of his œuvre. The aim of this paper is first to present the geographical statements of Weber’s hypothesis; second, to criticize the Eurocentric geographical imagination behind his global comparative analysis; and finally, to elucidate the discoursive conditions and antagonisms of social scientific knowledge production embedded in its contemporary geopolitical and imperial-colonial context. The deconstruction of Weber’s orientalist dichotomy of a “progressive West” and “static East” is supplemented by a sketchy overview of his thoughts on Islam and some political economic examples, demonstrating the silences of colonialism and the changing hegemonic relations of interregional global trade, and also the myth of oriental despotism and the “closed” economies of Eastern economies. In sum, the aim with this critique is to provide and argue for a global historical, postcolonial and decolonial reading of the scientific canon of “classical” sociology.

© Zoltán Ginelli

Citation:

Ginelli Z. (2020): A „klasszikus” szociológia dekolonizálása felé: Max Weber eurocentrikus világtörténetének földrajzi kritikája. Kritikai Földrajz Blog, 2019.07.18. Link: /2020/07/18/a-klasszikus-szociologia-dekolonizalasa-fele-max-weber-eurocentrikus-vilagtortenetenek-foldrajzi-kritikaja/

Colonial Hungary in East and Southeast Asia: The Orientalism of János Xántus

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Southeast Asia and Central-Eastern Europe: Forgotten Connections, Stories and Histories

Panel for the EuroSEAS 2019 Berlin Conference, September 10–13, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Convenors:

Dr. Jan Mrázek (National University of Singapore) – [email protected]

Dr. Mária Strašáková (Palacký University, the Czech Republic) – [email protected]

– PRESENTATION CANCELLED –

Abstract

János Xántus (1825–1894) is remembered as one of the most famed Hungarian natural scientists of the 19th century. As a zoologist and ethnographer, he was a strong supporter and contributor to the Hungarian National Museum, corresponding fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1859), founder and first director of the first Hungarian zoo (1866) and the Ethnographic Museum (1872), and founding member of the Hungarian Geographical Society (1872). Becoming a political refugee after the failed 1848–49 Hungarian war of independence from the Habsburg Empire, in the 1850s and early 1960s he was drawn into North American expeditions, and developed a vast network to transfer specimens regularly back to Hungary. Finally returning to Hungary (for the second time), after the Austro-Hungarian compromise (1867) he gained the opportunity during 1869–71 to participate in a series of imperial expeditions to East and Southeast Asia, including Ceylon, Siam, Singapore, Java, China, Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, and Borneo. The original plan of the Austro-Hungarian expedition was to develop foreign trade relations with the opening of the Suez Canal, but it did not fulfill this promise and internal political tensions evolved between Austrian and Hungarian counterparts. This paper focuses on this expedition to explore a postcolonialist and critical geographical interpretation of Xántus, and to elucidate his activities in colonial networks and his global comparative ideas about colonialism and race. This reading aims to epistemologically contest the dominantly biographical and documentary accounts of Xántus, which follow institutionalist or nationalist legitimation logics (focusing on his collections, personality and merits) and seldom engage critically with the wider social, economic, political-ideological and racial contexts of colonialism. While Xántus’ activities relied on national, imperial and colonial power networks and interests, he was known for his critique of colonialism and his solidarity with the colonially suppressed, and made various colonial and racial comparisons between his local Hungarian and foreign experiences. This paper aks whether he pursued Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentric criticism in his Asian interpretations, and how his depictions of the East fitted in the wider colonial discourse of Western or European Orientalism. The case of Xántus may shed light on how Hungarian colonial knowledge production was embedded in global colonialism.

xántus utazásai

Source: http://www.zoldjovo.hu/documents/Xantus_Janos_Szasz_Eva.pdf

Gyarmati tudást termelő magyar geográfusok

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1935-ben a neves geográfus, Kádár László jelentetett meg egy tudományos ismeretterjesztő magazinban, a Búvárban cikket Afrika gyarmatosításának a történetéről. Néhány évvel később a magyar gyarmati tudástermelés az olasz és német gyarmati érdekek propagálása felé fordult, és élesszavú geopolitikusok (mint a németbarát Kalmár Gusztáv) kezdték mérlegelni, hogy Magyarország hogyan tudna ezen hatalmak afrikai térnyerésének farvizén érvényesülni. Ugyanabban az évben Kádár egy másik cikket is írt az olasz gyarmatosításról és Abesszíniáról, amit nemsokára lerohant az olasz hadsereg. Még Kádár viszonylag leíró és mértéktartó elbeszélését, amelyben olykor-olykor felbukkan az afrikai népek szabadságával szembeni halovány szimpátia is, lényegében nagy eurocentrikus narratívák uralják. Minden történelmi eseményt pusztán az európai hatalmak racionális és felvilágosult “döntéseire” vezet vissza, miközben az afrikai népek érdekeit, cselekedeteit és ellenállását elhallgatja. Afrika gyarmatiság előtti történelmét félreteszi, és az európaiak késői területi gyarmatosítását (a 19. század végétől) mindössze éghajlati és földrajzi tényezőkkel magyarázza, holott a valóságban az európaiak erős ellenállásba ütköztek a felfegyverzett afrikai államok részéről:

“Ennek az oka elsősorban a kontinens felszíne és éghajlata: partjai majdnem kivétel nélkül meredek, magas partok, amelyekre nehéz felkapaszkodni, a folyók is vízesésekkel zuhognak alá közvetlenül a torkolatuk előtt is, és így víziúton sem lehet a szárazföld belsejét megközelíteni. Északon a Szahara széles sivatagja is megközelíthetetlenné teszi az értékes Szudánt. Délen pedig a gyilkos trópusi klíma is erősen hátráltat. Ez magyarázza meg azt, hogy amikor Amerikában és Indiában már virágzó ültetvények voltak, Afrikát csak munkásembert szolgáltató kontinensnek tekintették és tovább nem érdeklődtek iránta.” (681. o.)



– ENGLISH VERSION –


HUNGARIAN GEOGRAPHERS PRODUCING COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE

In 1935, the noted geographer László Kádár published in a popular scientific magazine, Búvár about the history of colonizing Africa. A few years later Hungarian colonial knowledge production turned towards propagating Italian and German colonial interests, with rabid geopoliticians (such as the pro-German Gusztáv Kalmár) calculating how Hungary could follow up on the their promising trajectories in Africa. In the same year, Kádár also wrote another article about Italian colonies and Abyssinia, a country which was soon occupied by the Italian army. Even in Kádár’s rather descriptive and moderately toned account on African colonization, which was sprinkled with traces of distanced sympathy towards African independence, we can see grand Eurocentric narratives unfold. All historical events are simply based on the rational and enlightened “decisions” of European powers, without any account of the interests, actions and resistance of African people. The precolonial African history is sidelined, and the late territorial acquisitions of colonies in the continent (from the late 19th century) is explained by climatic and geographical factors, while Europeans met with the strong resistance of militarized African states:

“The main reason for this is the continent’s relief and climate: its shores are almost exclusively high and steep, which are hard to climb, and rivers plunge down in waterfalls even near the mouth, thus the internal lands cannot be reached through waterways. In the north, the wide desert of the Sahara makes the valuable Sudan inapproachable. In the south, the devastating tropical climate also forms an impediment. This explains that while in America or India there were already blooming plantations, Africa was seen as a continent offering manpower and remained of no further interest.” (p. 681)

Új blogsorozat: Magyarország és a gyarmati világ / New blog series: Hungary and the colonial world

A bevett olvasat szerint nekünk soha nem voltak gyarmataink, sosem vettünk részt a gyarmatosításban, ezért semmi közünk nincsen a (poszt)gyarmati világhoz. De valóban így lenne? Új blogsorozatom ezt a témát igyekszik körüljárni! Hogyan kapcsolódott Magyarország a gyarmatosításhoz, a gyarmatbirodalmi rendszerhez és a gyarmati diskurzushoz? Milyen módokon fogalmazták meg a gyarmatiság kérdését és problémáját magyar tudósok, írók és politikusok? Hogyan termelték, mutatták be és hogyan fogyasztotta a magyar közönség a kolonializmusról és a gyarmati világról szóló földrajzi tudást? Hányféleképpen értelmezhetjük a gyarmat és a gyarmatosítás fogalmait magyar és kelet(közép-)európai szempontból? Vajon hogyan tekinthetünk a magyar történelemre és társadalomra másképpen a gyarmati viszonyok vizsgálata szempontjából? A bejegyzések a magyar földrajzi tudástermelés (poszt)koloniális viszonyait feltáró kutatásaimat követik kritikai geográfus szemmel, várhatóan magyar és angol nyelvű olvasók számára is!

Kövessed és oszd meg a bejegyzéseket Facebookon a Magyar Kritikai Geográfusok Fórumán!


– ENGLISH VERSION –

According to the dominant narrative, we Hungarians never had colonies, we never participated in colonization, and so we have nothing to do with the (post)colonial world. But is this so? My new blog series aims to cover this topic! How did Hungary relate to colonization, the imperial colonialist system, and colonial discourse? In what ways was the colonial question problematized and discussed by Hungarian scholars, writers and politicians? How was geographical knowledge about colonialism and the colonial world produced, presented and consumed by the Hungarian public? How can we conceptualize the terms colony and colonialism from a Hungarian and Eastern (Central) European perspective? In what multiple ways can we understand Hungarian history and society differently in light of colonial relations? The blog posts will follow my research on the (post)colonial relations of Hungarian geographical knowledge production from a critical geographical view, hopefully coming to both Hungarian and English readers!

Check out and share the posts on Facebook on the Forum for Hungarian Critical Geographers!

Speaking from the Semi-Periphery: Decolonizing Geographical Knowledge Production in Socialist Hungary, 1960s to 1980s

In recent months I’ve prepared a new research plan/paper on the stuff I’ve been doing, connected to my work in the 1989 After 1989 project:

The “spatial turn” in the history of scientific knowledge has called into question abstract notions of scientific development and specifically national disciplinary and institutional narratives. The past two decades has seen a growing number of studies in the historical geographies of scientific knowledge (HGSK), aiming to understand where knowledge is produced and disseminated, and how the content of knowledge changes in motion and adapts to local contexts and social interests (Livingstone 2003; Powell 2007; Withers 2009). Recently, increased globalization has summoned an upsurge of research focusing on interconnectedness through knowledge networks and circulations, transnational histories and global comparative studies, arguing against the “methodological nationalism” of previous research in favour of alternative transnational concepts (Keim et al. 2014; Conrad 2016).

On the other hand, postcolonial and decolonial approaches have contested Eurocentric or Westcentric epistemological frameworks and discursive formations, providing a reassessment of multiple or alternative modernities and elucidating the hierarchical orders of knowledge regimes (Chakrabarty 2007; Boatca and Costa 2012). However, much of this original literature on postcolonialism focused either on the global centre or the former colonial world, silencing in-between semiperipheral contexts such as Eastern Europe under transitory and provincialised terms such as “postsocialism,” while there has been little theorizing between the “posts” (Chari and Verdery 2009). This marginalization process has also led to the concealment of Second-Third World relations and the interdependency of centre and periphery contexts in an interconnected global context (Ward 2010; Mark and Apor 2014).

While the perceived non-colonial background of Eastern Europe provided excuses for many in the region to distance themselves from postcolonial studies (Moore 2001), historical studies have nevertheless shown the existence of long-term structures of hierarchical dependency and East-West “civilizational slopes” even since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (Wolff 1994), which have well endured into socialist and postsocialist times (Melegh 2006). This continuity is well captured by the self-Orientalizing development and geographical concepts in social science, geography and economic history (Petrovici 2015). These can be exemplified by various contexts: the enduring dichotomies of “Eastern” and “Western” development (Éber et al. 2014), the “catching-up” neoliberalist transitology (Stenning and Hörschelman 2008), the “civilizing mission” of European Union accession (Böröcz and Sarkar 2005), the subaltern adaptation of development policy models, and the uneven reproduction of Western academic hegemony.

This research argues for “decolonizing” diffusionist and neoevolutionist theories that have been appropriated as the dominant narrative of the global centre and imposed upon the Eastern European context (Boatca and Costa 2012). Simultaneously it argues for a global perspective of transnational interconnectedness in understanding Eastern European developments in the production of geographical knowledge. It does so by using contemporary literature in critical geography and international relations, and specifically in postcolonial, decolonial theory and world-systems analysis to deconstruct internalised structures of dependency and global hierarchies inherent in Eastern European geographical epistemologies. By “speaking from the semiperiphery,” it aims to reassemble local knowledge production on global geographical concepts, in light of overlooked global historical interconnectivity between “East” and “West.” The research aims to apply these theoretical insights to understanding how Hungarian reform economists tried to position the country in various global imaginations between the 1960s and 1980s in the context of integrating into the world economy and thus breaking away with Cold War concepts amidst increasing global competition and economic restructuration due to crises.

After World War II, the imperialist and nationalist-revisionist ambitions of the Hungarian state elite crumbled with the demise of the previous “high imperialist” era. The Communist takeover and the process of Sovietization created a new setting under the imperial and colonial influence of the Soviet Union, and a rise of economist experts succeeding the pre-WWII primacy of geographers. Stalinist orthodoxy summoned a dichotomous Cold War imagination of separate “capitalist” and “socialist” worlds, soon to be called “world systems,” while the production of geographical knowledge and textbooks on regional geography also followed this essential dichotomy. But the détente period after de-Stalinisation and the gradual opening up of diplomatic and trade relations due to an economic upturn in the world economy and the process of decolonisation led to reconfigurations in global geographical and development imaginations.

The maintaining of the Eastern European “buffer zone” necessitated the Soviet Union to foster trade relations both with the West and the so-called Third World. Eastern European reformers in Poland and Hungary pushed towards “market socialism”, as acquiring advanced technology and foreign currency from the West implied finding ways to finance development either through foreign loans or export-oriented growth, and facilitated exporting expertise and investments into the Third World and searching for state-led development models abroad, such as in Spain, South Korea and Chile (Bockman, Feygin and Mark forthcoming). These reformist ambitions generated a virulent debate and the emergence of new geographical concepts connected to the country’s shifting foreign trade policies and lobbying activity in international organizations (UN, UNCTAD, GATT) in order to manoeuvre between “East” and “West.”

While the concept of the “Third World” was disregarded by Eastern European socialist countries, they aimed to reposition themselves between “developed” and “undeveloped” countries in an urge to “catch up” with the West. By the 1970s in Hungary, some new concepts such as “semi-periphery,” “small economies” (Kádár 1971), “open economies” (Kozma 1980) had emerged in the Centre for Afro-Asian Research (1965-) and the Institute for World Economy (1973-) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which consequently developed the new field of area studies. In turn, some Western concepts, such as Wallersteinian world-systems analysis and the concept of “semiperiphery” were influenced by Eastern European economic historiography. In later developments, the series of Fejlődés-tanulmányok [Development Studies] published in 1978–1989 and journals such as Világtörténet [World History] introduced the new fields of development studies, world-systems analysis, centre-periphery thinking and postcolonial theory into the fields of area studies and international relations.

This research thus aims to understand through historical materials of scientific publications and policy papers connected to these institutions how alternative geographical conceptions of socialist globalization emerged and permeated global imaginations in area studies. The theoretical-methodological novelty of this research lies in connecting the approaches of transnational or global history, political economy and the history of ideas: Hungarian semiperipheral knowledge production is conceptualised in the interconnected contexts of centre-periphery relations.

References

Boatca, M., Costa, S. (2012): Postcolonial Sociology: A Research Agenda. In: Rodríguez, E. G., Boatca, M. (eds.): Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.

Bockman, J., Feygin, Y., Mark, J. (forthcoming): The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Alternative Globalisations 1950s–1980s. Manuscript.

Böröcz, J., Sarkar, M. (2005): What is the EU? International Sociology, 20(2): 153–173.

Chakrabarty, D. (2007): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chari, S., Verdery, K. (2009): Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1): 6–34.

Conrad, S. (2016): What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Éber, M., Gagyi, Á., Gerőcs, T., Jelinek, C., Pinkasz, A. (2014): 1989: Szempontok a rendszerváltozás globális politikai gazdaságtanához. Fordulat, 21.: 10–63.

Gille, Z. (2010): Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition? Global Society, 24(1): 9–30.

Kádár, B. (1971): Kis országok a világgazdaságban. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó.

Keim, W., Celik, E., Erche, C., Wöhrer, V. (eds.)(2014): Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences: Made in Circulation. Corchester (UK): Ashgate.

Kozma, F. (1980): A nyitott szerkezetű gazdaság. Budapest: Kossuth.

Livingstone, D. N. (2003): Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mark, J., Apor, P. (2014): Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989. The Journal of Modern History, 87: 852–891.

Melegh, A. (2006): On the East-West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: CEU Press.

Moore, D. C. (2001): Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique. PMLA, 116(1): 111–128.

Petrovici, N. (2015): Framing Criticism and Knowledge Production in Semi-peripheries: Post-socialism Unpacked. Intersections, 1(2):

Powell, R. C. (2007): Geographies of Science: Histories, Localities, Practices, Futures. Progress in Human Geography, 31(3): 309–329.

Stenning, A., Hörschelman, K. (2008): History, Geography and Difference in the Post-Socialist World: Or, Do We Still Need Post-Socialism? Antipode, 40(2): 312–335.

Ward, S. (2010): Transnational Planners in a Postcolonial World. In: Healey, P., Upton, R. (eds.): Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices. London and New York: Routledge. 47–72.

Withers, C. W. J. (2009): Place and the “Spatial Turn” in Geography and in History. Journal of the History of Ideas, 70(4): 637–658.

Wolff, L. (1994): Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

Where were the oldest universities outside “Europe”?

The “university” is a very Eurocentric term: it is said that because there were no “corporations” in the “East”, the archetype schools of higher education did not exist there, which is, of course, not true (apart from the academies of antiquity, noteworthy is the Byzantine unversity, which was not based on “corporation” but “charity trust”). Due to this conception, European expansion could be traced in geographical space by the establishment of European learned societies, the so-called “unversities”. I’ve just discovered that the first universities outside “Europe” were founded mainly by Spanish monks in the 16th century in colonial Latin America. The oldest is in Santo Domingo, today the Dominican Republic (Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, 1538), which makes it the first university established in the Western hemisphere. The oldest one still in operation is in Lima, Peru (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1551) and the oldest in North America is in Mexico (Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, 1551). The first university in Asia was founded in The Philippines (Universidad de Santo Tomás, 1611), but colleges were developed from 1589 on (some became universities afterwards). This was 25 years after the route accross the Pacific Ocean was discovered in 1565.

UST_in_Intramuros

“The Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, established by the Dominican missionaries in 1611 and raised to the rank of a University in 1645 by Pope Innocent X through the petition of Philip IV of Spain, is currently the educational institution with the oldest extant University charter in Asia.”

Secular globalization as Westphalianism versus Islamism?

I simply can’t believe this entry on Fundamentalism by Bassam Tibi in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Theory (2010).

It propagates as the process of “secular globalization” the so-called “Westphalian system of nation-states”, which is actually a historical myth of Eurocentric scholars. As if it was a natural process. And as if globalization happened only because of and at the time of “European expansion”. And as if it was simply “expansion”. And the text strips all historical context of imperialism and colonial realities, and transmutes it into a “secular process of globalization”. Then opposes it with only one thing: Islam fundamentalism. As if fundamentalism cannot be something else from “Islamism”. And it also constructs the false Eurocentric dichotomy of “secular” and “religious” states, suggesting that the latter is fundamentalist. Oh yes, and how about when Europeans highlight their “Christianity” against “Islam”, isn’t that an ironic appeal then?

“The overarching context of fundamentalism is the reality of a worldtime of globalization. In fact, each civilization is based on a particularism of its own time documented in its own calendar. Additionally, one can speak of premodern civilizations while avoiding evolutionary thinking. There are also civilizations that are not secular and therefore religion based. The historical roots of contemporary and modern globalization are the process of the European expansion. The related processes are viewed as an expansion of the international society established in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648. This globalization is a secular process that results in the mapping of the world into the system of the secular nation-states. It was believed that this mapping was also a part of the universal process of Westernization and secularization. Today, the religious fundamentalisms uprising in non-Western civilizations against the West belie this assumption. Anti-Westernism is, for instance, the substance of Islamist fundamentalism as the vision of a restoration of a religious order against secularity and the West, as well.” (p. 537)

“The concept of divine order is envisaged to challenge and subsequently replace the prevailing Westphalian order of sovereign states. This order is by its origin Western, as a state system was created in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but it is the state system of today imposed on the entire world since the wave of decolonization that completed the mapping of the globe into a Westphalian system. This secular political world order is now threatened by religious fundamentalisms, in particular the Islamist one (Philpott, 2002).” (p. 539)

How could they possibly publish this? Outrageous!

Muslims condemning things

There’s this great tumbler called Muslims Condemning Things, which is about samples of muslims and their communities condemning violence, oppression, terrorism, etc. It shows great evidence, and acts as an excellent reminder for us about biased Eurocentric and orientalist conceptions of “islam” and the “East.” People can write them to contribute with cases they have found. As the site says:

“People are always asking, “Why don’t Muslims condemn terrorism /  fanaticism / violence in the name of Islam?” They do. Here’s proof. Inspired by Muslims Wearing Things.”

Contribution of Arab geography to European “discoveries”

“Finally, maritime geography was the last kind discovered during the Ottoman Empire simultaneously with European “geography discoveries.” Columbus’ journey to the New World was motivated by Arab maritime geography. Vasco da Gama used Arab cartography during his journey to Africa and guided by Mal’im Cana. Marco Polo’s journey was guided by Arab sailors. Portolans, Rahnamjats were used by Europeans sailors. Oceanography was founded by Arab maritime geographers and continued on by European modern geographers. The spirit of Muslim Spain was reincarnated in the new Portugese and Spanish Christian geographers and Sailors.”

Contributions of Arab geographers.

List of Muslim geographers.

Islamic cartography.

Hanafi, Hassan (1992): World-views of Arab Geographers. GeoJournal, 26(2): 153-156.