Islamic Settler-Colonialism, part 1

Settler-colonial theory is a hit job

Series intro:

The term “settler-colonialism” and its associated academic disciplines were designed to incriminate Israel and Anglophone ex-colonies like the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But the term would be better applied to Arab, Turkic, Persian, and other Islamic empires that colonized the world from Iberia to the Philippines and from Sarajevo to the Zambezi watershed. Present day threats to humans are far more likely to come from would-be Islamist colonial masters than from the usual targets of settler-colonial theory.

The leaders and citizens of not-yet-Muslim-majority nations often display basic misunderstandings about the past, present, and future of Islamic colonization. I hope this series sheds light on the matter.

Why use a term you take issue with?

Language can be used to obscure as much as reveal. The term “settler-colonial” is a recent coinage, ostensibly meant to distinguish a colony like the British in Australia—where they quickly became a majority by settling there en masse—from the British in India where relatively few Britons were present in proportion to the prior population. So far so good. That appears to be a useful distinction.

Proponents of the term however, took it much further, revealing their political agenda to malign Anglophone ex-colonies by insisting that once a settler-colonial state, always a settler-colonial state. To these academics, the mere continuation of Australia, the USA, New Zealand, and Canada as states with a majority European population and government is a continuation of the “genocidal” policies that created them.

The term “settler-colonial” now prejudices discussion. In Patrick Wolfe’s famous formulation “…settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” That is to say, settlers are inherently doing evil to the Indigenous people they colonize. True believers of this theory hold surprisingly ahistorical beliefs about the inherent virtue of Indigenous peoples, verging on a sort of blood and soil nativism.

But they ran into a problem: No one in their right mind thought the governments of the Anglophone countries would go back to their European ancestral lands (not to mention the fact that people came from other regions, including Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, etc.). But there was a more recently formed nation, whose existence had been contested from before it started: Israel.

From the earliest days of settler-colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe and his ilk have targeted Israel as the epitome of settler-colonial genocide and supported the Arab population of what was formerly British Mandate Palestine as the sacred Indigenous people whose claims to legitimacy supersede all others.¹ This is ahistoric nonsense, but continues a line of propaganda pushed by the USSR, who coined the term “antizionism” and supported Arab national movements in a ploy to end Jewish self-determination.

Consider the difference between the concept of “settler-colonialism” and “conquest and assimilation.” Conquest and assimilation are the story of human history. Alexander the Great did it. Romans did it. Han Chinese did it. Chinggis Khan did the first part, but less of the second. Indigenous American tribes and nations conquered and assimilated each other. As Helen Dale recently put it in an article critiquing settler-colonialism:

The Homo sapien forager populations that replaced Homo neanderthalensis in Europe were replaced in their turn. Even the farmer-builders of Stonehenge—who had replaced the previous foraging population—were almost entirely replaced by pastoralist invaders. Waves of newcomers to the Americas pushed previous arrivals South long before Europeans arrived. Brutal wars were a feature of human societies in the Americas both before, and during, European settlement.

According to the Bible, Joshua and the Israelites conquered the Canaanites (but the archaeological record fails to hold that up). It’s a tale as old as time. And it’s a story full of far more complexity than “Settler violence BAD; Indigenous violence resistance GOOD!” So why am I using the “terms of the oppressor” instead of a morally neutral term like conquest?

As Adam Kirsch points out, what China is doing in Tibet and Xinjiang now seems perfectly suited to a less ideological sort of settler-colonial analysis. But that research opportunity has been largely ignored. One might proffer other examples throughout history: Roman colonization, Viking colonization and settlement of Britain and Normandy (among others), the Russification of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Central Asian republics and points east, or the settlement of Central and South America by the Spanish and Portuguese (in a timeframe that overlapped the more vilified English colonization). The lack of interest in these examples of literal settler-colonial efforts puts the political agenda into stark relief.

My point in looking at Islamic expansionism through a settler-colonial lens is to demand a re-examining of how this moralizing, prejudicial language looks when applied to examples that we have been encouraged to ignore. If the settler-colonial analysis fits younger nations like the USA and Australia, then it fits the Islamist empires and movements all the more. If you dislike conquest and assimilation, at least be historically fair about it.

This series will look at historical and contemporary examples of Arabization and Islamization. These processes are deeply interwoven, as it was Islam that made Arab values go global. Over time these have led to the homogenizing and erasure of minority groups in the MENA region and elsewhere.

In the particularly overheated application of settler-colonial theory to Algeria and Palestine, attempts were made to cast the Arab population of those countries as an Indigenous people with eternal roots in the land. Helen Dale, again:²

Apart from the fact that Arabs tend to refer to themselves as Arabs (often with some pride), this occludes the fact that Arabs in many countries—and especially Algeria, the Ur-nation of settler-colonial theory—are themselves settlers. Arabs and Turks—along with Europeans—produced expansive and imperialistic religious cultures notable for their ability to supplant entire prior civilisations.

One of Fanon’s rhetorical sleights of hand is to class all Algeria’s non-imperial residents as natives. This creates a generic indigenous identity that obscures any history, including that the only difference between the nineteenth and twentieth-century French and the seventh and eighth-century Arabs is that the Arabs made their cultural, religious, institutional, and settlement stick. The French did not.

If making settlement stick is the measurement of indigineity, then the whole basis for indigenous virtue is a house of cards. Nowadays, it seems intuitive to believe the length of stay in a territory should confer right of ownership. Yet this is a relatively new concept in the grand sweep of history. Alternative theories have included who can conquer and hold territory or who can effectively govern. In times of low bureaucratization and control, people could vote with their feet. Many of the old world empires understood that finding a niche for each of the minority groups they ruled was an important way to keep the peace. But settler-colonial theory throws that all out for a “one against all” zero sum competition. Now the group some professors anointed as “Indigenous” has all rights and anyone on their land is an evil settler whose government should not exist.

Dale, again, quoting Kirsch:

“Every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population,” Kirsch says, “is, and always will be, a settler.”

“Settler” here includes people transported to both America and Australia in chains—slaves and convicts. And yes, that seems like the category error to end all category errors. But once Fanon is Australianised, this kind of reasoning becomes pervasive. African Americans “benefit from the settler-colonial system as it stands today,” the Southern Poverty Law Centre tells us, in very serious tones.

If the settler is cursed to forever be an interloper, what does that say about Arab and Muslim settlement outside of Arabia? The internal contradictions held by these academics are mind-boggling.

Arabization and Islamization shaped a vast swath of societies in our world today. For a refresher on some highlights of their colonial expansion and territorial holdings, have a look at the map below, this handy timeline, or this boosterish video from a Pakistani YouTube channel.³

(Map borrowed from reddit, where there’s a lively debate about its accuracy or lack thereof, as one would expect. My point in including it is to show the rapidity with which the Arab Muslims colonized north Africa, Iberia, Iran, and parts of central Asia.)

Beyond merely colonizing land, Islam also demands conceptual mastery. According to Muslim theology, one does not convert to Islam. All humans are born Muslim and lose their way if not raised in a Muslim family. Thus, one can only “revert” to Islam — which is the term you will see used by the faithful. The prophets of Islam include heroes of Judaism and Christianity—Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and so on—who have been “reverted” to the one true path without their consent.

If one buys the logic of settler-colonial theory, the destructive nature of settler colonies means those nations are illegitimate. Like leftists demand of so many other institutions of orderly society, the settler-colonial state should be abolished. But you never see that demand applied to Egypt (formerly Christian, Greco-Roman, and Pharaonic), Iran (formerly Zoroastrian), Pakistan (created in the same year as Israel, huh….), Turkey,… you get the idea. I am not demanding the abolition of these states either. But consistency and rigor in public debate would be better than the inflammatory nonsense we have now.

To be continued in part 2, The socio-politics of Islam's settler-colonial past…

1. For more on this, I recommend Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.

2. This quote refers to Frantz Fanon, in recognition of the fact that Patrick Wolfe and other leading lights of settler-colonial theory hold him up as their forerunner.

3. Ranking the 15 Greatest Islamic Empires | Al Muqaddimah www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdjTwKI66G0 — copy/paste into a browser to look it up