Ahmad Fuad Rahmat

January 25th 2010

Fall 2009 – Spring 2010

Independent Study on Decolonization and Philosophy

A Critique of Enrique Dussel’s Project of Transmodernity

Objective

Enrique Dussel’s project of transmodernity is in essence a call to reconstruct

modernity from “below”, that is to say, from the perspective of those who, as victims of

colonialism, have had their voices silenced and historical significance cast aside by the

dominant Eurocentric narrative of modernity’s emergence. This is conceived by Dussel

as a crucial and necessary agenda for any measure to attain genuine decolonization:

transmodernity would provide an alternative discourse to European thought which, at its

current postmodern stage, can no longer speak to the colonized’s desire for emancipation.

The transmodern project strives to reach a stage whereby the terms and content of anti-

colonial liberation would no longer be dependent on European canons and contexts and

instead would be determined from within the spaces and resources of the colonized

themselves.

My analysis is interested in exploring the cultural limits of this conception,

namely, in Dussel’s steadfast commitment to an expressly modern agenda of

decolonization despite his incessantly proclaimed inclusivity, and despite awareness that

much of the contexts where decolonization discourse is occurring lies outside the sphere

of modernity’s historical developments. For this, I will closely consider Dussel’s

engagement with Arab-Islamic thought, particularly, his upholding of Moroccan

philosopher Muhammed ‘Abed Al-Jabri’s Islamic modernism as a model interlocutor for

Dussel’s transmodern discourse.1

It needs to be stated from the onset, however, that my reading of Dussel here will

not be concerned with his understanding of political Islam. My interest, rather, is in

underscoring the problems in the ways in which a non-modern context is understood and

valued by Dussel for its modern potential. It is indeed curious that Dussel, in his

persistent commitment to the modern provided little explanation for why exactly a vision

of decolonization should be articulated in modern terms. Dussel seems to assume that the

necessity and value of the modern for emancipatory thought is always already self-

evident.

My analysis will underscore the implications of that assumption for intercultural

dialogue. Specifically, this will entail a close consideration of one Muslim counter-

discourse to the modern concept of liberation. That discourse has intellectual

decolonization as its objective and is known as the Islamization of Knowledge. The goal

of this comparison, to be clear, is not to provide a clarification of decolonization in

political Islam to counter that of Al-Jabri’s. Rather it is to suggest, for Dussel’s project,

insights into why modernity, even with its purported “good” in mind, has been viewed as

problematic for many others engaged in decolonization struggles. The absence of any

sustained consideration of the latent wisdom in “anti-modern” positions, for lack of a

better term, renders Dussel’s call for a reconstruction of modernity from below somewhat

lacking in depth.

1 It is peculiar that Dussel misspells many of the Muslim intellectuals he cites in his paper. Al-Jabri, which is how his name would be transliterated to from Arabic to English, is spelled by Dussel as Al-Yabri. For the purpose of accuracy, I shall use the correct spelling for my paper. It is also the same spelling that is used n the English translation of Al-Jabri’s book, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique.

Specifically, the problem that my brief comparison of transmodernity with the

Islamization of Knowledge will bring to light is the way in which Dussel’s project

ultimately rests on a rather robust commitment to the subject’s emancipatory capacities

based on an assumption that history can ultimately be made progressive. This

consequently has implications on our understanding of the challenge that the transmodern

project would have to grapple with to be properly intercultural: it would have to explain,

and argue for, a latent emancipatory value in the way in which European history has

developed. The fact that this consideration is wholly absent in Dussel’s explications of

transmodernity places its intercultural credentials into serious question.

My paper will begin with an account of the transmodern project’s objectives with

emphasis on two things: First, how history is understood therein and second, how and

with whom transmodern dialogue ought to occur. The second part is where I will discuss

Dussel’s engagement with Muhammed ‘Abed Al-Jabri’s thought. Particular emphasis

will be given to how Al-Jabri is held as an exemplar for what Dussel views to be the ideal

theoretical task of the modernist in the periphery. I will then proceed with a discussion of

the Islamization of Knowledge, to outline the negative assumptions about modernity, as a

narrative of history, which motivates the Islamization of Knowledge’s own goals of

decolonization. My account of Islamization of Knowledge will be brief and descriptive,

proceeding insofar as it will sufficiently problematize Dussel’s project.

I should note here that my inclusion of the Islamization of knowledge into the

discussion does not assume that its assumptions about modernity are not problematic. I

do not include the Islamization of Knowledge in this discussion as an alternative. In fact,

let me state here from the onset that, for the most part, my allegiances lie with Dussel’s

project. To be clear, my consideration of the Islamization of Knowledge is motivated

only by the need to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the transmodern

project. My critique should be seen as a friendly amendment rather than a direct

challenge to Dussel.

Enrique Dussel and Transmodernity

To understand Enrique Dussel’s project of transmodernity, it will be necessary to

firstly outline how Dussel defines modernity. Given the great range of historical

developments that “the modern” insinuates, it is understandable that Dussel’s definition is

an all-embracing one:

Modernity is a phenomenon originally European – and it is evident that its sources date back to Egyptian, Babylonian, Semitic, Greek world but that only in the 15th century it reached worldly implementation; and that it constitutes and reconstitutes itself simultaneously by a dialectical articulation of Europe (as center) with the peripheral world (as dominated sub-system) within the first and only “world system”. Modernity originates in the Europe of free cities (within the context of the feudal world) from the 10th century on, approximately, but is born when Europe constitutes itself as the center of the world system, of world history, that is inaugurated (at least as a center of the world system, of world history, that is inaugurated (at least as a limit date with 1492) … Only modern European culture, from 1492 onwards, was a center of a world system, of a universal history that confronts (with diverse types of subsumption and exteriority) as all other culture of the earth: cultures that will be militarily dominated as its periphery. (Dussel 1996, 132. Italics in original.)

Modernity for Dussel is the collection of circumstances that shaped the moment of

European colonialism. It is material and economic, in that it is generated by concurrent

European conquests for natural resources. It is cultural because the conquests led to

violent contact between Europe and the areas of the world that soon became its periphery.

The transmodern is what Dussel takes to be the intercultural philosophical and

theoretical implications of those developments: the colonial encounter between Europe

and its colonized also led to the European realization of modern subjectivity

A great part of the achievements of modernity were not exclusively European but grows from a continuous dialectic of impact and counter-impact, effect and counter-effect, between modern Europe and its periphery, even in that which we could call the constitution of modern subjectivity.

(Dussel 1996, 133. Italics in original.)

To illustrate this point further, Dussel uses the Cartesian ego, which inaugurated

philosophical discourses on the modern subject, as an example: “The ego cogito also

already betrays a relation to proto-history, of the 16th century, that is expressed in the

ontology of Descartes but does not emerge from nothing. The ego conquiro (I conquer),

as a practical self, antedates it. Hernan Cortes (1521) preceded the Discours de la method

1636) by more than a century. Descartes studied at La Fleche, a Jesuit college, a religious

order with great roots in America, Africa and Asia at that moment. The “barbarian” was

the obligatory context of all reflection on subjectivity, reason, the cogito” (Dussel 1996,

133. Italics in original.) This is what Dussel meant by the continuous dialectic of effect

and counter effect” between Europe and the periphery (Ibid). It was through the

European colonial encounter with Others deemed “barbaric” that the notion of

“civilization” that has been claimed and upheld by the West was imagined. This in turn

became the mainstay of colonial justifications to exploit and destroy the natural resources

and social structures of the colonized. There is a clear Marxist influence to this analysis

in that it takes the expansion of European capitalism as the efficient cause of this

narrative. 2

While accepting modernity as a significant world event, the transmodern project

argues that our understanding of its promises and potential remain flawed and

incomplete, given the absence of any consideration towards the effects of colonialism in

the construction of that event. The point here to be sure is not to merely incorporate or

harmonize the colonized into the European fold but to upset the limited way in which the

narrative has been determined by Europe in its destruction of the voices and worldviews

that have hitherto remained invisible. That, in turn, will be invested towards constructing

a new vision of modernity. There is then a larger story about modernity that has yet to be

The rapid development of technology in the West was concurrent with the

realization of the region’s natural scarcity, which then necessitates its outward venture.

By this definition Spain would be the “the first modern nation” given that it heralded the

moment of Western colonialism in its so called “discovery” of the Americas (Dussel

2004, 14). This was followed by the ascendancy of other European powers followed by

the Dutch, English, the French and Belgians. In all cases, the cause of civilization and

progress was intermingled with the apparent material destruction it wrought. At any rate,

the fact that this very barbarism remained largely invisible to the ensuing European

interpretations of modernity not only renders our understanding of it incomplete but that

modernity can only be thought about through the conquest of the West over others. The

fact that this encounter of ideas has remained unacknowledged in much of philosophical

scholarship is evoked by Dussel to make his larger point about the assumptions and goal

of transmodernity: The colonized thus far have remained in what Dussel describes as the

“exteriority” of the European narrative.

2 Much more can be said of Marx’s influence on Dussel although I will refrain from any further commentary here given that most of the literature on the subject is in Spanish.

told by those who were oppressed and excluded in its construction. Thus, against the

common narrative, transmodernity does not view modernity temporally as a succession of

historical moments inherent to Europe but spatially, borne out of encounters outside

Europe. It is both geographical and epistemological. It is geographical in that it takes the

modern potential in the sites considered Other to Europe. It is epistemological insofar as

the voices and worldviews of those who suffered in that process remain excluded from

the common narrative on how that history came to be.

The engagement and formulation of an alternative modernity then cannot proceed

without a consideration of the effects of colonialism, without first inquiring into how the

exclusion occurred and was entrenched. Ignoring this would only risk a replication of the

dominant narrative. Indeed, for Walter Mignolo, one of the main presumptions of the

transmodern approach is that “the expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion

of Western epistemology in all its ramifications” (Mignolo 2008, 227). That is, Western

hegemony, reached the global south not only in the form of physical, material destruction

under the guise of “civilization” but that the cultural transformations therein were also

subtle: it exported, however indirectly, the salience of a European way of looking and

understanding the world. My paper is not the setting to get into details of how that

epistemology was transported so widely. This at any rate was a general conclusion the

transmodern discourse drew from researches in dependency theory. What we should note

here, specifically, is how the ramifications of export of European epistemology are far

reaching, spanning to include “the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism

and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both

capitalism and the state” (Mignolo 2008, 227).

The fact that the West has been so embedded in the self understanding of the

colonized is not only evident among the more conservative or reactionary elements of the

colonized: it is also discernable among progressives and the left. Mignolo reminds us that

“intellectual colonization remains in effect, even if such colonization is well intended,

comes from the Left and supports decolonization” (Mignolo 2008, 232). The effects then

are far reaching: “it is no longer possible, or it is not unproblematic, to think from the

canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do

so means to reproduce the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not

impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion (Mignolo 2008, 234). The project of

actual decolonization then must even be cautious of blindly accepting solutions and

terminologies from the European experience. This also includes descriptive terms such as

liberal, conservative and socialist, given their origins in “the political-ideological

tripartite distribution of the late nineteenth century North Atlantic political and

ideological spectrum” (Mignolo 2008, 235).

The solution to this would be to firstly, be attentive to what Dussel labels as “the

geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo 2008, 233). That is, decolonization motivated

towards actual liberation, must be aware of the sources of philosophy with which he or

she engages, the colonial imprints therein and its overall suitability to addressing

concerns of those silenced and alienated in the periphery. What needs to occur here then

is proper engagement with local efforts that are already at work towards constructing

alternative modernities against the hegemony of the Western colonial order. The

transmodern indicates the response to modernity “from another place, another location”

(Dussel 2004, 18). They respond from the perspective of their own cultural experiences,

which are distinct from those of Europeans / North Americans, and therefore have the

capacity to respond with solutions which would be absolutely impossible for an

exclusively modern culture” (Dussel 2004, 18). The point here, however, is not merely an

appropriation of modernity for particular contexts. Rather, the transmodern project

conceives this as a necessary first step towards realizing more inclusive conceptions of

the virtues underlying modernity. This Dussel labels as “the pluriversal”: the transmodern

project aims to construct a discourse whereby “we will have a rich pluriversity” that is an

outcome of an “authentic intercultural dialogue” affirming “the positive moment of

modernity” although this will be “evaluated through criteria distinct from the perspective

of the other ancient cultures” (Ibid.).

The transmodern project then should not be conceived as a dialogue between

anyone and everyone. Dussel is clear that the colonial legacy that has for long silenced

indigenous voices should be excluded from the onset, given the already established

presence of its culture in the periphery. This is not to suggest that Western thought can

never, by default, play a role in the project. It is just that a consideration of its

overwhelming dominance throughout history necessitates the imperative to prioritize

those who have been most negatively affected in that process of domination: Thus “it

must be an intercultural South-South dialogue before it can become a South-North

dialogue”: it is the voices of those who have not been able to speak or engage with

modernity on their own terms that must be prioritized (Dussel 2004, 24). The colonized

in the global South then can turn to one another as resources and partners in political

dialogue.

Another implication to this acute sensitivity to colonial history and actual

decolonization is that some segment of the voices in the South will also have to be left

out in the process. Thus while Dussel is clear on the fact that Transmodernity must

necessarily entail south-south cooperation, he is explicit that the project is ultimately

most suitable for those committed to emancipatory politics and thought. The dialogue “is

neither only nor principally a dialogue between cultural apologists that attempt to

demonstrate to others the virtues and values of their own culture” nor is it a dialogue

“among those who merely defend their cultures from its enemies” (Ibid).It is, ideally, a

dialogue between those who aim to reconstruct modernity, those who depart “from the

critical assumptions found in their own cultural tradition and in that of globalizing

modernity” (Ibid). Thus this is how we can understand the transmodern project as an

intercultural South-South dialogue that is committed towards the creative rebuilding of

modernity in light of the material damages and epistemological hegemony of Western

colonial history: it is a conversation “between the critical cultural innovators”, between

those who, while located outside modernity, is nonetheless seeking to creatively

appropriate it for his or her own context (Dussel 2004, 25).

Transmodernity, Arab-Islamic Thought and Muhammed ‘Abed Al-Jabri

Arab-Islamic thought figures rather prominently in Dussel’s account of what the

practice of transmodern discourse might look like. We find this not only in the names that

are suggested but also in actual works. For Dussel he expressed a keen interest in the

works of Muhammed ‘Abed Al-Jabri, in particular, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A

Contemporary Critique. This is taken, by Dussel as an example of critical cultural

innovation worthy of transmodern dialogue. Al-Jabri is a philosopher native to the

Maghreb, the frontier between Africa and Europe which was once continuous but now

broken because of colonialism. In the book he discusses the history of classical Islamic

philosophy (sometimes referred to the rationalist period) with particular emphasis on

Averroes, the philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle were instrumental in the

development of European philosophy in the Middle Ages, and by extension, European

philosophy in general. It is a work located at a particular geographical and intellectual

crossroads.3

The particular insight that Dussel views to be valuable here is how Al-Jabri

provides an alternative reading of Islamic intellectual history. Writing against both the

traditionalists and modernists, Al-Jabri all at once denies the simple valorization of the

classical age of Islamic rationalism by latter and the rejection of it by the former. Both, in

any event, are not only by and large scholastic but can be also read as conclusions drawn

from Eurocentric discourse. The traditionalists are reading history with an agenda of

post-independence cultural retrieval while the modernists sidestep, if not underestimate,

the colonial question altogether. Ultimately their “relations with the European cultural

legacy seems to be more narrow than those that they maintain with the Arab-Islamic

legacy, who pose the problem of contemporary Arab thought in these terms: How can

this thought assimilate the experience of liberalism before or without the Arab world

going through the stage of liberalism? (Dussel 2004, 23). By assuming liberalism as the

primary challenge, Arab intellectual work affords a primacy to a historical moment that is

borne out of a particularly European experience. Instead, for Al-Jabri the question should

be about the reconstruction of a progressive society: “How can Arab thought recuperate

3 Dussel, however, does not seem to find the fact that much of Al-Jabri’s most well known works were written in French to be relevant to further questions on the colonial relationship between authorship and readership. The fact that Europeans will read Al-Jabri first, before Arabs, is curious.

and assimilate the rationalist experience of its own cultural legacy and bring it to life

again, with a perspective similar to that of our ancestors: to struggle against feudalism,

against Gnosticism, against fatalism, and to install the city of reason and justice, a free

Arab city, democratic and socialist” (Dussel 2004, 24). Indeed, Al-Jabri turns the

question towards a distinct agenda of decolonization.

Al-Jabri begins by describing the concrete cultural exchanges that are often

overlooked in much of the discussions on the classical rationalist period. He briefly

leaves the particulars of the text towards underscoring the interactions between Muslims

and their cultural others at the time. Here Al-Jabri draws a distinction between eastern

Islamic thought, marked by the work of the Mu’tazilites, Avicenna and Al-Farabi on one

hand, and western Islamic thought, marked by the philosophy produced in Andalucia on

the other. The intellectual milieu of the former was marked by a multiplicity of cultural

influences from Persian Gnosticism coming from Iran, to Greek Byzantine theology and

Greek Neo-Platonism. This, inevitably, informed their approach on harmonizing

philosophy with Islamic theology. Muslims in the western frontier of the Islamic world

engaged with Islamic philosophy at a later time, and more importantly a greater distance,

from the center of Islamic learning which for centuries was located in the east. Thus,

western Muslims had no choice but to inherit the flurry of cultural mixing that was latent

in the canon by then. Given that the cultures were mostly foreign to Muslims in the west,

their reading of philosophy underwent gradual although consistent attempt towards

deconstructing and in turn reconstructing the relationship between philosophy and

theology (a “purge” of sorts as Dussel describes it) (Dussel 2004, 22). This project

eventually culminated into the work of Averroes who, with the use of Islamic sources,

formulated the distinct, although not incompatible, realms of operation between faith and

reason. Jabri describes how for Averroes, philosophy signifies a break with the gnostic,

obscurantist, and eastern spirit” of Islamic thought” (Dussel 2004, 23). This however did

not mean that it was opposed to religion but that the method with which religion and

philosophy are made to interact must be carefully determined. It was from that process

that Averroes came with the conclusion that since in reality the ancient philosophers

already studied, and with greater care, the rules of reason (logic, method), it would be

useful for us to lay our hands on the books of those philosophers, so that, if we find

everything they say therein to be reasonable, we accept it, but if there is something

unreasonable, it can serve us as a precaution and warning” (Ibid).

All this reveals to Dussel an intellectual history of engagement with reason that is

apart from the traditional Eurocentric narrative. The Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition

“remained faithful to its tradition but it subsumed the best elements of the other culture

(as determined according to its own criteria), which were in some aspects more highly

developed (for example, in the elaboration of logical science)” (Dussel 2004, 23). Jabri’s

work is anti-colonial for its presentation of a hermeneutic that is not locked by a binary

that is ultimately Eurocentric, however implicitly. Jabri’s work is critical, indeed

modernist, in its writing against fatalism for a socialist future based on reason. More

valuably for Dussel, it reveals the possibility of critique from a “creative bicultural space”

of a modernist writing from within a location that has been removed from the mainstream

narrative of modernity (Ibid). We find the same themes of reason and progress articulated

from a source foreign to Europe but is still nonetheless rich with alternative insights: “the

positivity rooted in a tradition distinct from the Modern” that is sought after for the

transmodern dialogue (Dussel 2004, 26).

Thus the stage is now set for Dussel to commence transmodern dialogue: “This

sort of dialogue is essential. As a Latin American philosopher, I would like to begin a

conversation with [Al-Jabri] beginning from the following question: Why did Islamic

philosophical thought fall into such a profound crisis after the fourteenth century? This

cannot be explained merely by the slow and growing presence of the Ottoman Empire.

Why did this philosophy enter the blind alley of fundamentalist thought?” The answers

are not documented in the article although Dussel does explain why Al-Jabri would be

suitable to provide them for Dussel’s project as Al-Jabri represents “the affirmation and

development of the cultural alterity of postcolonial communities (peoples), which

subsumes within itself the best elements of Modernity” (Dussel 2004, 26). Al-Jabri is

other to European modernity, but not other to modernity itself. The dialogue then is one

step towards transmodern progress: it is a long and difficult journey: “a period of the

creative and accelerated cultivation and development of one's own cultural tradition, which is

now on the path toward a trans-modern utopia. This represents a strategy for the growth and

creativity of a renovated culture, which is not merely decolonized, but is moreover entirely

new” (Dussel 2004, 25).

Enrique Dussel and the Modern

What we can sufficiently discern from Dussel’s explication is that modernity

marks a specific juncture in history that is unique for the human potential to attain social

and political progress that it signals. In turn, modernist thought in the global periphery

not only values that potential but aims to address how it ought to be engaged towards

particular principles that are crucial to progressive decolonization. For example, we see

Dussel emphasize this in his discussion of Rigoberta Menchu: she is touted as an activist

of freedom and equality against the prevalence of “fatalism” and “passivity” in her

indigenous community (Dussel 2004, 23). Al-Jabri, as we have just seen, is the

Maghrebian equivalent of Menchu.

What one finds curious in Dussel’s commitment to the efforts of Al-Jabri and

Menchu is how he can manage, on one hand, the need to incorporate excluded colonized

voices in transmodern dialogue and, on the other, the imperative to engage only those

who express a commitment to “integrate the best of modernity” (Dussel 2004, 26). In

other words, while the transmodern project is steadfast in its belief that there are Others

who have hitherto been omitted from the narrative of modernity’s coming to being, the

project’s very design seems to only make way for those who are ultimately modernists.

To Dussel’s credit, he has been very careful in articulating the kind of modernist outlook

that ought to be engaged with for his project: the modernist intellectual is not one who

blindly incorporates European ideas for his or her context. This cannot be liberation,

given that those ideas are monocultural, limited to only within the European perspective.

The modernist is a critic of both tradition and Eurocentric modernity, with the objective

to develop a richer understanding of both the local in which he or she is located and the

universal. The necessity of a critical appropriation of modernity against Eurocentrism and

the false assumption of cultural authenticity is for Dussel the mark of an emancipatory

critique that is genuinely decolonizing.

Exclusion can be a virtue, given that decolonization is never a straightforward

affair. Decolonization is often a struggle between competing forces, some progressive

and some reactionary. There are also competing interests sometimes expressed in ethnic,

religious racial and class divides (Amilcar Cabral, once famously remarked that the

African bourgeoisie should commit suicide as a class). Thus, Dussel’s straightforward

profession of allegiance to one out of the many competing voices of decolonization is

understandable. This is all the more so in the context of political Islam where competing

ideologies for decolonization continue to proliferate along with the intensification of US

imperialism in the Muslim world.

If this move to commit in order to exclude is what Dussel aimed to do, which I

think is the case, then the question it raises is whether or not the framework he offers in

his project justifies that move. That is, is the modern / non-modern binary a salient and

sufficient one to understanding progressive decolonization in the present? Who exactly

are these non-modern / anti-modernists that are to be excluded? More importantly what

do we lose sight of by omitting them from our consideration of transmodern discourse?

This section of my paper will aim to reflect on those questions by considering one critical

discourse on decolonization that assumes a role as a counter-discourse to modernity.

The counter-discourse is known as the Islamization of knowledge. I have chosen

this because, like Al-Jabri’s work, it emerged in the milieu of great Muslim

preoccupations on the relationship between Islam and modernity. It is, in other words,

part of the very context that Dussel himself engaged. The presuppositions about

modernity that the discourse holds, however, are different to Dussel’s, as I stated in my

introduction. As we shall see it is very critical of modernity. More strikingly for our

discussion, it is not interested in any form of internationalism nor does the category

“liberation” central to its goals. It is, in other words, disqualified immediately from the

onset for transmodern dialogue. This, however, should not imply that it would not have

insights that Dussel’s project would not benefit from considering. Indeed, we shall find

rather broad overlaps: the Islamization of Knowledge is not passive or fatalistic. In fact, it

appears to be committed to the value of self-determination and governance. It is this

interplay between similarity and incompatibility that is worth considering, given that a

view of transmodernity from the perspective of the Islamization of Knowledge might just

accentuate further some of the assumptions about modernity that the transmodern may

need to consider in its outreach to other contexts.

The Islamization of Knowledge is a philosophical project initiated by Palestinian

philosopher Ismail Al-Faruqi and Malaysian philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-

Attas. Its main goal is to recover Islamic epistemology from the corruption of

Westernization, which it views as the domination of modern epistemology in the Muslim

world. Muslims, it is argued, are “already being unduly influenced by the modern

Western secular scientific conception of the world” (Al-Attas 1996, 25). This includes

everything from materialism (“a conception of the world that is restricted to the realm of

sense and sensible experience) to the dialectic (“a worldview based on a system of

thought that is originally God-centered, then gradually became God-world centered and is

now world centered and perhaps shifting to form a new thesis) (Al-Attas 1996, 25-27).

The reason for this wholesale denial is because of the purported end of metaphysic that

modern Western philosophy is assumed to represent. In this “no true worldview can come

into focus when a grand scale ontological system to project it is denied and when there is

a separation between truth and reality and truth and value” (Al-Attas 1996, 30).

What follows such criticism is an assertion of what Islamic epistemology can

achieve:

Islam affirms the possibility of knowledge; that knowledge of the reality of things and their ultimate nature can be established with certainty by means of our external and internal senses and faculties, reason and intuition, and true reports of scientific and religious nature, transmitted by their authentic authorities. Islam has never accepted, nor has ever been affected by ethical and epistemological relativism that made man the measure of all things, nor has it ever created the situation of the rise of skepticism, agnosticism, and subjectivism, all of which in one way or another describe aspects of the secularizing process which have contributed to the birth of modernism and postmodernism.

(Al-Attas 1996, 36)

This commitment to attaining knowledge of total reality is followed by the expected

affirmation of God’s existence and the need to be loyal to the purity of revelation.

Caution is repeatedly expressed towards secular thought which basic assumptions run

counter to the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. What is interesting for our

discussion here is that this denial of the supposed philosophical degeneracy that led to

modernism and postmodernism also equates to a denial of the progression of Western

historical periodization. For Al-Attas, Islam has no reason to recognize: “historical

periods that can be characterized as classical, then medieval, then modern and now

purportedly shifting again to postmodern; nor critical events between the medieval and

the modern experienced as a renaissance and an enlightenment” (Al-Attas 1996, 28). That

is to say, if the progression of Western history is taken as a story of epistemic alienation

from metaphysics to the isolation of the human from the categories it would need to

spiritually flourish in this world (such as angels), then the Islamization of Knowledge

sees no need to find itself a place in that narrative. Given that its commitment to

decolonization is motivated towards reclaiming the possibility of a genuine spiritual

experience lost by the dominance of Western science in the Islamic world, the

Islamization of Knowledge would have no interest in continuing the story of the Cogito

for example, who assumes the subject as the foundation of all metaphysics. Against all

this, Al-Attas makes even a bolder claim that the essence of Islam, because it is a religion

of perfect design, can be easily extracted from superficial cultural and historicist effects,

and that the task of the Muslim intellectual is to pursue that process of extraction and

preservation.

In fact, if there is a historical story that the Islamization of Knowledge can tell is

that of its apparent descend into total loss of culture and civilization. Indeed, much of the

need to reclaim a philosophical culture that has been lost due to the ascendancy of

Western hegemony is because of the fact that human existence at this juncture of late

modernity is rather bleak: “the crisis of truth pertains to true knowledge, and the crisis of

truth has perhaps never been so acute in our age. Modern philosophy and science are

unable to give a conclusive answer to the permanent question about truth. Their

representatives attempt to clarify only the truth perspective’ of the age in which the crisis

of truth occurs, thus divesting truth of its objectivity” (Al-Attas 1996, 44). “Change,

development and progress” that can sufficiently address the concerns of Islamic thought,

for Al-Attas, must entail “a conscious and deliberate movement towards genuine Islam”

(Al-Attas 1996, 68).

Our consideration of such claims should be careful to assume that the Islamization

of knowledge is somehow incapable of, or uninterested in, any critical filtering of

Western culture. Al-Attas concedes, despite his steadfast and problematic call for

authenticity that a lot of good has come out of Western science. But that this does not

mean that Western science can be regarded as the ultimate bearer of truth, which is how

its value has been assumed in much of the Islamic world still recovering from the legacy

of colonialism. “We know no science is free of value” and ultimately, a true complete

science must speak to the human condition, and this includes its internal spiritual

faculties as much as its physical health” (Al-Attas 1996, 69).

We shall, for the purpose of this paper, bracket our concerns on above the claims

of cultural authenticity, the possibility of knowing ultimate reality and the like. What

needs to be underscored at this stage is what we can discern of the overlap and

divergences between transmodernity and the Islamization of knowledge. Indeed much of

the concerns expressed in the above paragraph, in a broad sense, overlap with Dussel’s

own. The Islamization of Knowledge is suspicious of Western hegemony. It is also

suspicious of the normative claims in the Western story of how history developed.

Furthermore, the desire for it to reconstruct its epistemology in light of Western

hegemony towards reclaiming an authentic essence of Islam indicates that it is not

fatalistic, and that it has a bold vision that one may even consider utopian, however much

the particulars of that vision may be foreign and unsettling to us.

The crucial difference here, which I take to be where all the other differences

stem, is Dussel’s acceptance of the Western story of historical progress and Al-Attas’

apparent incredulity that given the epistemic crises it has yielded that it can be construed

as progress at all. For Dussel, the story of historical progress has yet to be told, since it is

still dominated by a hegemonic European narrative. Thus it must be claimed and restored

by its rightful, and thus far unacknowledged, contributors. That Europe has a debt to the

colonized for its achievements, which is the fundamental assumption of transmodern

discourse, is recognition of the validity of the form of those achievements, however

wrong the manifestations of those achievements are. This also informs the assertion the

repayment of this debt is necessary for the next stage of modernity’s development, so that

a better world can be realized.

For Al-Attas, the question is far deeper than that, and it entails the problem of

epistemic alienation: “the term progress refers to a definite direction that is aligned to a

final purpose that is meant to be achieved in worldly life. If the direction sought is still

vague, still coming into being as it were, and the purpose aligned to it is not final, then

how can involvement in it truly mean progress? People who grope in the dark cannot be

referred to as progressing” (Al-Attas 1996, 69-70). As I mentioned earlier, Al-Attas is not

against any commitment to progress. But whether it should entail an engagement with a

European narrative of history, with colonialism as a necessary moment for the maturation

of that history, is something he would have to deny from the onset. The question that may

be posed indirectly from this position is what reason do we have to believe that the

history of the West, which is as Dussel acknowledges, a history of brutal destruction of

the colonized, paves the way for human salvation? What proof has there been that the

assumption that liberation is a human capacity that is actually pursuable within the

development of European history? Now this need not be a Muslim concern so much as a

general and empirical one. Consider for example, the kind of Heideggerian technological

alienation from Being that is felt in all modern communities. Or for a clearer problem, we

can pose how the destruction of the environment that has proliferated in the past two

decades (for which even a Marxist analysis cannot provide satisfactory critiques) can be

read as marks of progress.

There are of course problems in Al-Attas’ own presupposition of progress, in his

desire for a terminus and simplified metaphysics. But the concern that underlines this is

what he views the eventual state of liberation from intellectual hegemony to be: humans

must be able to find meaning in this existence, and this necessarily entails an ability to

know and be certain of his or her purpose. Specifically, according to the Islamization of

Knowledge, for a Muslim this must entail an ability to reflect on God and revelation,

experiences which have been obscured by the rise of technological knowledge, fueled by

Western hegemony in the West. Dussel on the other hand, envisions decolonization as a

struggle: “this means a long period of resistance, of maturation, and of the accumulation of

forces” (Dussel 2004, 25). What exactly the attainment of either state of liberation will look

like is something neither provides in their respective works I’ve turned to for my analysis.

Indeed, it seems as if Al-Attas would have more of an answer than Dussel. It does, however,

indicate a crucial difference between them and a crucial question for Dussel’s transmodern

discourse.

I will not speculate on the implications of this difference although I want to

suggest that given this comparison, the difference in the assumption of history between

the two discourses reveal that Dussel’s emphasis on engaging with the bicultural

intellectual appears more strategic than a testament of his openness. That is, by choosing

to engage with third world intellectuals who are already committed to modernity Dussel

is merely affirming what he already instinctively sense, albeit of course in a different

context. It is intercultural insofar as we have an Argentinean discoursing with a

Moroccan. This is not to reduce the value of such an encounter. The do not engage with

modernity only to affirm European superiority. Nonetheless, it does highlight the absence

of any significant risk in engagement on Dussel’s part, since the Other in this

configuration nonetheless accept the validity of the modern as a political project worth

continuing. This in turn puts into more perspective the transmodern project’s calls for an

engagement with ideas “from another place, from another location” (Dussel 2004, 18).

They ultimately refer to calling for engagement with modern locations. They are distinct

insofar as their experiences of modernity are distinct, but some affirmation of that

experience is nonetheless necessary.

What my comparison has also shown is the potential wisdom in suspicions against

modernity from other decolonization projects does not warrant a mere rejection of their

concerns. Recall that Dussel, in his allegiance to Al-Jabri, also adopts Al-Jabri’s

assumptions. For example, fundamentalism is not defined but is regarded, however

cautiously by Dussel, as “philosophical decadence”, as “isolationist” and confined to a

“blind alley” of sorts (Dussel 2004, 24-25). What my comparison has shown is that even

if we want to regard “fundamentalism” as embodying all those negative things (and let’s

assume, for the sake of argument that the Islamization of Knowledge is all those things)

such labels do not explain an understanding of why a commitment to modernity is

undesirable for some, and more importantly, it closes further avenues for dialogue and

co-operation between decolonization struggles. What would be the reason for an

intellectual, who is acutely aware of the horrors of colonialism, to concede that the path

of history of which colonialism was central must be engaged, and steered towards a

direction of “liberation”? Why should this be a, if not the, central assumption for any

philosophical agenda of decolonization that is truly emancipatory? This would entail the

necessity to argue that the ideas that emerged in the historical period that coincided, and

in fact were intertwined, with the horrors of colonialism were ultimately good and that

they must be reclaimed. But to argue that those horrors were a necessary moment of a

larger story of progress would first be necessary. And this may be more difficult to do

than to simply brush aside those who do not share the modern vision as “isolationists”.

Dussel’s desire for the “new” cannot come at the expense of ignoring other voices

(Dussel 2004, 25).

Conclusion

Contrary to the post-modern, the transmodern does not assume that the

commitments to liberation and progress that has defined the modern project have run

their course or have lost their credibility. Indeed one does not find in Dussel even the

slightest suspicion towards those commitments: They are possible, their virtues are

evident and thus they should be pursued. This should not be read to suggest, however,

that the transmodern is by default straightforwardly “modern”. The expected referents to

the defining events of the modern age such as the Enlightenment and the industrial

revolution are there, although in mentioning them Dussel is often forthright against the

assumption that they were uniquely European moments, as if the achievements associated

with the modern age were discovered and developed by and within Europe alone. Against

these two mainstream definitions of modernity, the transmodern aims to formulate a

conception of the modern that would be truly planetary, whereby the significance of the

colonial encounter in its constitution would be better understood. It is, in other words, an

attempt at constructing a bolder vision of modernity than we have known.

This paper, in essence, has been an attempt to reflect on a possible problem in the

necessary intercultural direction that the transmodern project would need to take in order

for its viability. I have done this by comparing the transmodern project with another

project of intellectual decolonization, known as the Islamization of knowledge. Through

this, we have seen more clearly the centrality of Enrique Dussel’s commitment to a

certain emancipator value in the story of modern European history for the execution of

his transmodern project. This, in turn, raises important questions on how communicable

the transmodern vision is. As my analysis suggests, the problem with formulating a non-

Eurocentric vision of modernity is that it must nonetheless affirm, however indirectly,

some value in colonial destruction. This value is not simply instrumental, but

metaphysical, a part of a longer story of human development towards Utopia. It is a

peculiar commitment and thus cannot be taken for granted as evident, especially given

the diversity inherent to decolonization discourse. To move beyond this would be to take

more seriously the grievances and apprehensions that have been expressed against the

story of modern history, and to incorporate whatever wisdom therein into the

transmodern project. Only then, can we speak more productively of a pluriversality.

References

Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib (1996) “The Worldview of Islam: An Outline.” in

Islam and the Challenge of Modernity: Proceedings. ISTAC Press: Kuala

Lumpur.

Al-Jabri, Muhammed ‘Abed al-Jabri (1999) Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary

Critique. Translated by Aziz Abbassi. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies:

Austin.

Dussel, Enrique (1996) The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and

the Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta. Humanities Press:

New Jersey.

Dussel, Enrique (2004) “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation From the

Perspective of Liberation.” Available at: http://www.enriquedussel.org/txt/Transmodernity%20and%20Interculturality.pdf

Mignolo, Walter (2008) “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference” in

Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel and Carlos A. Jauregui. Duke University Press: Durham and London.