Image Credit: ReOrient Journal

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. And so, here we are, all of us, standing at attention at a massacre (or two), and suspended in speechless horror at the brazenness of the genocidal violence displayed before our eyes. As scholars of Critical Muslim studies, we are at the knife’s edge of a rather large matter having to do with silence and the power it consorts with. In the face of the denial of genocide, we either leave blank the page on which constant vetoing, injustice, and lies risk being written, or we state—and document—what we know to be true.

We are surrounded by as much speech, of course, as there is power. Our campuses and city streets have erupted with dissent that has been spliced by coercion. Our streets and centres of institutionalised knowledge have become the focus of legal and military command and control. University administrators are collaborating with government entities, and turning over their sealed files. They are also gating their campuses, enlarging security, sending monitors to classes, reviewing syllabi, censoring curricula, surveying scholarship, codifying rules of conduct, submitting faculty to ideological training, and holding disciplinary hearings. Students and faculty, especially those in Middle East Studies are being scrutinised and sanctioned. And let us not forget the increasing amount of people outside of campuses that are being beaten, disappeared, and deported. The reasons and stakes are clear: there are definitions of statehood and identity that are being adopted, implemented, and imposed through mechanisms of surveillance that are designed to monitor and punish our behaviour and speech. The conditions of knowledge are now dangerously loaded, and colonial epistemologies have been refired by the historically entrenched political justifications carrying the day.

With the enduring diktats of a colonising Europe now in the savage maw of power, we must ask what it means for scholars of Critical Muslim Studies to re-orient, namely, to orient once more, to orient anew and away from an epistemic expansion driven by genocidal appetite and military compulsion. We are spectators of a bloated and barbaric violence, and never before have we had this level of visual access to the obscenity of raw and abominable power. This time, unlike in the past, we cannot say we did not know. Not only do we possess the knowledge of the factuality of genocide, but the awful responsibility of considering it in its temporal presence. The loss left loudly in its wake is unspeakable. This is precisely where the question of decolonising inserts itself; it is where the ineffability of genocide is compounded with witnessing a vanishing corporeality.

What, then, is the epistemology of a genocide? The epistemology of a genocide is the fundamental confrontation with the temporality of what remains when knowledge is being syncopated with the slaughter and annihilation of a people. It is the genealogical grounding of its conditions. It insists, against all prohibitions, that a genocide actually is. It makes knowable what it is, but also who and what its subjects are. It is the knowledge that the disappearing materiality grounding the lives, traditions, cultures, beliefs, practices, literatures, languages, art-forms, principles, histories, architectures, imaginaries, possibilities and more, the very breath of what it is to be human, to be Palestinian, cannot only be found in the cadence of hindsight. The epistemology of a genocide is the decisive question for decoloniality, haunted as it always is with the spectre of death and violence: It is a question of the present subject positions of Palestinians, and the ones they will hold in the recuperation of a disappeared history. And, fundamentally, it is the present subject position of who we all are.

Ultimately, the answer also lies in how the words we invoke are matched to action, and whether they are founded on a moral relevance that steels itself against the manufacturing of an easily instrumentalised and weaponised industry of knowledge. We are reminded to work in concert with the direct action of activists and truth-speakers. People are dying, and they are taking pieces of us with them. And, in their death, in the death of Palestinians and of so many others, we ourselves are being reconstituted as subjects and as human beings. What are we willing to lose? Taking on the posture of non-conformism and dissent, writing genealogies as protest—this is how we come together against our impending moral irrelevance and the dissolution of our intellectual authority as Critical Muslim Studies scholars.