A gentle reminder:
PEWS CONFERENCE 2006
ISLAM AND THE MODERN ORIENTALIST WORLD-SYSTEM
30th Conference of the Political Economy of the
World-System (PEWS) Section of the American
Sociological Association (ASA)
April 27 - 30 2006
Macalester College
The conference will take place April 27-30, 2006 at
Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Send
your 3 to 4 page proposals to Khaldoun Samman as an
electronic attachment: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The deadline to submit proposals is December 15, 2005.
Whatever we mean by "Islam" has been transformed
radically by the modern world-system. Zones that were
once part of the core of the "ancient world system(s)"
- with the Muslim world at its center - were swallowed
up whole in the nineteenth century, relegating the
Mughal, Qajar, and Ottoman empires to the margins of a
Western-centric world, with "Islam" now residing at
the losing end of this system, subordinated to
European and American power, whereas previously it
stood far ahead. World-Systems analysis has been a
useful tool in coming to terms with the fact that the
world is politically, economically, and culturally
stratified, with race constituting the very epicenter
of the stratification. Racism and underdevelopment,
Orientalism and its residual "Other," the "West" and
the "rest," the rise of Europe and the decline of
southern civilizations were all a product of
modernity, of a specific global social formation held
together by power. The lens through which we have
access to it is racially tainted, leading to an
interpretation of a world where the "West" possesses
some unique trait that legitimates its rise above the
"rest," rendering the "Arab," the "Turk," and the
"Muslim" racially or culturally inferior, unable to
match those refined qualities that are believed to be
the sole patrimony of the "West." The questions we
wish to raise for this year's PEWS conference are
multiple: Is world-systems analysis useful to
understanding the present geopolitical conflicts
between some sectors of the "Islamic" and "Western"
world? How do we understand the impact of modernity
on the gender and racial identities of the multiple
Muslim communities around the world? How has the
modern construction of nations and "peoplehood"
informed and affected the conflicts that we now
witness in such places as diverse as Cyprus,
Palestine/Israel, India, Ethiopia, and the Sudan among
others? Also, do the present crisis in historical
capitalism and the failures of postcolonial
antisystemic movements inform the current rise of
Islamist movements? What has been the impact on
"Islam" and on the rest of the world of the fact that
there have been major migrations of Muslims to zones
that, until the twentieth century, had few Muslims -
Europe and the Americas in particular?
THEMES
1. Islam as an autonomous "civilization" versus Islam
as part of a larger world civilization:
For writers like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington,
Islam can be understood only (or best) through the
lens of "cultural environment" and/or religious
influences. These two writers argue that the present
conflict between "the West" and "Islam" is due largely
to the fact that these are two antithetical
civilizations. Islam represents a cultural universe
that is in essence anti-modern and anti-Western.
Muslims, according to this narrative, are culturally
indigestible to the modernist project. They have
learned from their seventh-century predecessors in
Mecca and Medina traits and men¬talities that are
intrinsically anti-modernist. How would a
world-systems analysis respond to this essentialist
discourse? Is there an entity that we can identify as
an Islamic civilization not simply as a belief system,
but as a set of organizing structures (economic,
cultural, and political) of a world-system in its own
right? To what extent can we speak of multiple
"civiliza¬tions" within the framework of the modern
world-system?
2. Islam, Modernity, and the Restructuring of Racial
and Gender Identities:
Many of the conflicts that look religious in
character, stemming from time-immemorial, are actually
a product of a very recent development. As the
Islamic umma became disjointed both materially and
politically in the nineteenth century, "a drastic
transformation in the non-Muslim millets (ethnic and
religious communities) broke up into smaller groups in
which ethnic and religious affinity became outwardly
the basis of identity" (Karpat 1973). Modernity, in a
sense, restructured every aspect of the Muslim world,
from its class make-up and trade patterns to its
formal political structure. Religious, gender, and
ethnic identities were especially impacted by this new
reality. Papers in this section explore the
consequences of the emergence of new identities and
"peoplehood," specifically in terms of gender
relations, "European" and Muslim relations,
Arab/Muslim and Jewish relations, Turkish and Arab
relations, Greek and Muslim relations, Kurdish and
Arab relations, Coptic and Muslim relations, Sunni and
Shiite relations, North African and Sub-Saharan
relations, Hindu and Muslim relations, or any other
group relations affected by modernity.
3. Crisis of the Modern World-System and Islamist
Movements:
Are contemporary Islamist movements an expression of a
legitimacy crisis in the ideology of historical
capitalism? Here we will investigate nationalist and
Islamist discourses in the Middle East and elsewhere
over the past two centuries to explore whether or not
contemporary Islamist movements differ from earlier
postcolonial movements. Some have argued that in the
past the "Arab-Islamic world" reproduced the discourse
of progress by accepting "modernizing" discourses and
state-centered developmental projects. Nationalist
discourses from the late nineteenth century to the
1960s generally accepted the challenge of "modernizing
Islam," relegating the religion to the private sphere
and creating a culturalist and racialized discourse in
which "Islam" was understood as an obstacle to
modernizing the subjects of the state. Islamists
today, on the other hand, have chosen a completely new
understanding of "progress." As such, this last phase
seems to be a rejection by Islamists of the discourses
coming from Western elites as well as those coming
from the old antisystemic movements. As a result, by
the late twentieth century the second wave of response
to the West began to emerge, producing a radicalized
version of Islamic identity characterized by what we
may call the Islamization path. Can these current
Islamist movements be understood as antisystemic? How
do the current Islamist movements differ from past
postcolonial movements?
4. Muslims as Minorities in Europe, the United States,
and Latin America:
The twentieth century has witnessed an important
migration of Muslims from Asia and Africa to Europe
and the Americas. Muslims have become large and
growing minorities in these predominantly Christian
countries. In many of these countries today, there is
a major political discussion about the degree to which
these Muslim immigrants (now often of the second and
third generation) are being "integrated," or can be
integrated, into these countries. The traditional
questions about all immigrant groups have been
accentuated by the geopolitical implications of the
fact that we are talking here of Muslim populations.
This has been accentuated by two things: (1) the
reaffirmation of certain symbols of Islam (the
headscarf for women, for example) by many Muslim
groups, and (2) the fact that since September 11
Muslim populations have been linked by some
politicians and some media to the issue of
"terrorism." In Europe, in addition, this question is
at the heart of the debate about the potential
membership of Turkey in the European Union. How may
we understand the issues surrounding "immigrants" in
the current geopolitical context?
The conference will take place April 27-30, 2006 at
Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Send
your 3 to 4 page proposals to Khaldoun Samman as an
electronic attachment: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Or by mail:
Khaldoun Samman
Macalester College
Carnegie Hall 207
1600 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55105-1899
The deadline to submit proposals is December 15, 2005.
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