Hasbun-Allahu-wa-Ni’mal-Wakil..

That repeating cry keeps on striking us.

Mothers losing their children, boys-girls losing their parents and families losing their homes. The whole city losing its life of past and present; hope for the future seems perishing under the genocidal bombardment. What is left to emerge is the repeating crying call: Sufficient is Allah, the best provider of all affairs.

A fateful decade has passed since ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies was founded. Created to engage with the humanities and social sciences in a genealogical critique of orientalism, ReOrient’s imperative has been to decolonise the annals of Eurocentrism that were spawned after Europe’s capture and realignment of the world. What started off as the intellectual project of purging the entrenched trajectories of orientalist epistemologies is now amplified by the onslaught of the multilateral forces menacing thought, knowledge, and speech. Coming straight for us is the accelerating tandem of power-knowledge that has been reignited in this latest cataclysm wrought upon the world.

Year after year, campaigns emerge urging Muslims to fight Islamophobia through better stories, counternarratives, respectability, dialogue and individual interaction. These efforts are well-meaning, but are often premised on understanding Islamophobia as arising out of misconceptions or ignorance. In reality, Islamophobia functions as a structural, institutionalised form of racism deeply woven into state practices, laws and public discourse. Misdiagnosing the cause leads us to fight the wrong battles and lose before we even begin.

Britain’s response to pro-Palestine protest indicates the illusion that political rhetoric, legislation and policing are merely a neutral set of procedures. Instead, they are a network of knowledge, institutions and practices that produce particular kinds of subjects, constructing the protestors as “dangerous” in relation to the rest of the “respectable citizen”. What is projected as “public order” is better understood as a regime that disciplines bodies, controls speech and secures the government’s epistemic and moral authority.

We should never judge anyone by how their adversaries represent them, especially when it comes to fellow travelers. In my case, a month of working and speaking on the streets of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh and Jamia during the 2019 protests against the union government’s new citizenship law, and a decade of sustained research and writing, was all ignored because of a clip mischievously propagated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their supporters. Also because, having been a victim of “Congress nationalism,” I try to seriously engage with the ideas of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Islamophobia, as a phenomenon and a concept, has been subject to much discussion, debate and academic scrutiny. Whilst research findings and theoretical arguments are at the forefront of this burgeoning body of knowledge, the challenges and tensions experienced by Muslims who research such issues have received lesser attention.