Tom Facchine – How Colonialism Impacts MUSLIMS

			Some people have asked me to go into more depth about colonialism. And for that you'd need to take
some courses and read several books. It's not really the proper forum to go into the fine details,
but what everybody has to know is that colonialism never stopped. It's still going on, but it has
shifted. So you know, if you break up colonialism and two different sort of periods, or have a
periodization of colonialism, you know, the first period was about sort of just brute material
extraction and conversion, right religious conversion, but then once modernity sort of really,
really hit, it became about the civilization mission and became about you know, that's when you sort
		

			of have racism that was very, very formalized and Chatel, slavery in the north north Atlantic slave
trade, and you have sort of the reformulation of law that happened specifically in the Muslim world,
you know, the war against the Shetty, either war against sort of Muslim society or Islamic society
and their placement of it with sort of just this extraction state, you know, this metropole sort of
periphery relationship. But even now, after the formal independence, and the installation of
autocrats and dictators across the Muslim world, we're just in another wave of colonialism. And that
wave of colonialism is much more ideological. It's much, much more based off of epistemic
		

			colonialism and soft power and sort of economic strings when it comes to IMF loans and austerity
measures and the World Bank or multi national corporations and their access to certain markets or
quote unquote, human rights and pushing liberalism and pushing feminism and pushing, you know, LGBTQ
policies. Just look at what happened to Uganda, right? There are consequences being played out in
the geopolitical sphere, depending on what you believe. And so colonialism has not stopped it has
simply shifted its tactics. And it has right now the hardest thing for Muslims is trying to cling to
real Islam and not the Islam that the colonizers want us to believe in the Islam of turn the other
		

			cheek and the Islam of just personal piety and all these sorts of things. And you need to keep your
head up and you need to stay awake. And you need to really pay attention to how things have shifted
over time and the history of ideas and how external pressures can influence and change the way that
we relate and understand our own tradition. That's the scary part. Because you think that you're
practicing Islam, you think that you're, you know, a card carrying Muslim, but how much of your
religious identity and practice has been shaped from outside forces that are only getting you to
engage with the parts of your tradition that they want you to engage with? It's a scary thing, but
		

			that's where we're at right now. And that's why, you know, everybody who's able to not everybody is
able to participate in this sort of intellectual warfare, this ideological warfare, but anybody
who's got the chops and the abilities and the skills to engage in this sort of thing, it I think it
is your duty in this historical moment to engage in this battle and to write and to read and to
think and to sort of make sure that Islam stays as it is Islam, the Islam that Allah subhanaw taala
sent and the Islam that the Prophet saw is that I'm sent and not somebody else's Frankenstein Islam
that they're trying to force down our throats.