‘Messy refusal’, assimilationist moves, and the reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality: examining anti-Islamophobia in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

visibly Muslim women in Lebanon, a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, experience significant anti-Muslim racism. Thinking through their anti-racist work, this article identifies and examines a refusal – a pre-emptive move away from power rather than against it that works to make it obsolete and survive despite it. Analysing this movement away, I argue, reveals it as a movement towards a neoliberal ‘civilized’, ‘cultured’, and consumer subject assimilating into Eurocentric modernity/coloniality while surviving in the materiality of its Muslimness. The article accordingly posits this as a form of ‘messy refusal’ – implicated in the cultural and epistemic reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality – and complexifies refusal’s growing celebration across anti/post/decolonial and indigenous scholarship. In doing this, it contributes to rethinking anti-Islamophobia from the so-called Middle East rather than Euro-America and examining it as a longer process rather than exclusively focusing on the racist moment and site.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racist resistance
• refusal
• Islamophobia
• hijab
• Lebanon
• modernity/(de)coloniality

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for all their generative engagement and feedback on this article. My thanks also go to Dr Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Dr Shaira Vadasaria for stimulating and contributing to my thinking around ‘resistance’ and ‘refusal’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Modernity/coloniality is here referring to the contemporary global world-system shaped by historical colonialism and its ongoing legacies in the present (Bhambra, Kerem, and Dalia 2018). This ‘capitalist/patriarchal western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system’ is understood to be a ‘concealing movement’ of erasure of the world’s diversity in pursuit of a Eurocentric universe and horizon (Grosfoguel 2016, 10; Mignolo 2012).

2. Racialisation is here conceptualized as the ‘hidden logic’ of the coloniality of power throughout the world: it is a global and globalized means used ‘to degrade whatever does not correspond to the imperial ideals of Modernity’ (Mignolo 2012, 56; Grosfoguel 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arab Council for Social Sciences Early Career Fellowship program with the Carnegie Corporation of New York [Cycle 7].