Decentring whiteness in engaging Muslim geographies

Abstract

In this commentary, I read Sidaway's ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’ as an invitation to engage in alternative cartographies and lateral engagements with what Islam (broadly and complexly conceived) might say to the discipline. In doing so, I build upon Sidaway's invitation to suggest a deeper engagement with the complexity of already existing Islamic geographical traditions and scholarship on Muslim spatialities by pulling out two themes that echo some of those raised in the main article: (1) Islamic traditions of mapping and cartography, and (2) scholarship on Islam and the city. The central aim of my response, however, is to push for different entry points when considering the decolonial possibilities of Muslim geographies rather than an entry point of dismissal from disciplinary geography. Only by decentring the whiteness of the discipline as the starting point, can Islamic traditions of geography be engaged on their own terms, as complex, evolving, contextual, and at times perhaps problematic.

Introduction

In ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’, James Sidaway (2023) argues that attending to Muslim geographies is necessary to recharge the calls for decolonising geography. He does so by first exploring how Islam and Muslim spatialities featured in two founding figures of the discipline – Isaiah Bowman and Henri Lefebvre – to argue that both share an ‘explicit othering of Islam and Muslim cultures’. While for Sidaway, Bowman's orientalist views are not a surprise, Lefebvre's oeuvre is more intriguing as Lefebvre inspires a critical tradition in geography. Yet, as Sidaway shows, even in that radical vein, Lefebvre advanced Eurocentric and orientalist ideas. Through this entry point, Sidaway stages the concerns about the potentials of decolonising geography in light of enduring Eurocentric tropes through a brief overview of postcolonial and decolonial geographical interventions, and with nods to the insights from Black thought. The rest of Sidaway's article proceeds to think about Muslim geographies by: first, foregrounding the Arabic term Dīn, and thus complicating conceptions of religion that are ascribed to Islam; second, looking into political, economic, and urban geographies to push against the dominant culturalist readings of Islam, mainly looking into circuits of capital flows around urban nodes of the Gulf region; and third, revisiting area studies through Muslim geographies by expanding imagined geographies of Islam. Sidaway, in my reading, advances two central questions/arguments. The first is: who writes about Muslim geographies and how are they read? And the second is: how do the logics of including Islam, Muslims, or Muslim spatalities continue to exclude them by presenting them as ‘object[s] of study’ rather than ‘intellectual tradition[s]’?

In my reading, Sidaway's article is an invitation for readers to engage in alternative cartographies and lateral engagements with what Islam (broadly and complexly conceived) might say to the discipline. And it is in this generative spirit of dialogue that I started imagining other beginnings and other conversations that chime with the paper's aim. Therefore, in this commentary, I build upon Sidaway's invitation to suggest a deeper engagement with the complexity of already existing Islamic geographical traditions and scholarship on Muslim spatialities, even if this scholarship sometimes sits at the outskirts of Geography as a narrowly defined university discipline. I illustrate this potential by pulling out two themes that echo some of those raised in the main paper: (1) Islamic traditions of mapping and cartography, and (2) scholarship on Islam and the city. The central aim of my response, however, is to push for different entry points when considering the decolonial possibilities of Muslim geographies rather than an entry point of dismissal outlined by Bowman and Lefebvre, a point which I return to towards the end.

Mapping Islam

In his work, Sidaway gestures towards the intertwining of Islam and practical sciences such as algebra, astronomy, and navigational practices (Sidaway, 2022; see also Sidaway, 1997). Pushing this gesture, I wonder what if we start with existing Muslim geographical knowledge? Here I am thinking, for example, of a longstanding tradition of Islamic mapping and cartography that ironically is rarely acknowledged in histories of geography. While no geography student will pass through their degree without being introduced to the contested representations and histories of mapping via a tour through European medieval cartography; only in a few geography departments might they encounter Islamic cartography as part of a geographical tradition.

However, scholars such as Zayde Antrim (2015, 2018) have meticulously analysed how an Islamic cartographic tradition evolved from around the 11th century (including Ibn Hawqal's World Maps), to the famous 15th century Al-Idrisi's The Book of Roger, to Ottoman mapping, to present-day attempts at counter-mapping. In doing so, Antrim illustrates that the region we typically understand as being mapped, demarcated, and ‘represented’ through colonial, nation-state, or western representations has had its own evolving practice of attachments to place and of mapping space. This tradition is important not because it is epistemologically different (or other), but because it demonstrates shifts in thinking about relationality, otherings, and belongings that were expressions of religious necessities (such as charting and storytelling pilgrimage routes), but not exclusively so. For instance, Islamic mapping did not always centre Mecca as a religious centre, as maps served various purposes (Antrim, 2018). An early tradition that attended to mapping the ‘Realm of Islam’ understood this area as composed of flexible regions with emphasis on mobility and connections to accommodate shifting political claims, rapid spatial expansions, and fluid religious conversions. Early Muslim geographers were supported by the Abbasid caliphate and their work reflected its expansion. Representations of space also reflected metaphoric relationships of belonging across a vast region of political divisions and cultural diversity. As cartographic traditions evolved with the early Ottomans (15th–16th centuries), they reflected a concern with navigation and contested power in the Mediterranean (with rising competing economic centres in Venice, Spain, and Portugal) as well as strategically signalling to the respect and protection of different religions and religious sects due to the expanding dynastic realm (Antrim, 2018).

This Islamic cartographic practice has had its own internal logics and shifts and was also in conversation with other cartographic traditions. Mapping and counter-mapping of Islam has persisted as a site of contestation through colonialism, contending with forms of territoriality, the nation-state, neo- and settler colonialism, and of course the War on Terror's cartographic imagination (see Culcasi, 2012). It is only by attending to these contestations as part of a longer story that Islamic geographical knowledge does not appear as a marginal other, or an ‘object’ of study. Echoing Sidaway's call, it helps recognise Islamic epistemologies as intellectual traditions, yet traditions that are complex, evolving, and contradictory.

Islam and urbanism

Sidaway invites us to think about Muslim geographies not only in the register of culture, but also in the intersection of political economy, urbanisation, and political geography. While the paper draws on important critical scholarship on oil and capital flows in the Gulf and alternative understandings of extremism beyond the lexicon of terrorism, I wish to point to scholarship on urban Muslim geographies beyond the registers of ‘oil’ and ‘terrorism’ that seem to attach themselves too readily to Islam. Specifically, I will focus on urban geographies and Islam, and (anti)colonial cities.

A sustained orientalist scholarship has advanced the thesis of the ‘Islamic City’ as a framework to understand the intersection of religion and urbanism. Speaking against this work, critical scholarship has complicated this orientalist view by attending to how Islam might have indeed impacted and altered urbanisation rather than the problematic focus on the Islamic city as a timeless construct. Antrim's Routes and Realms (2015), for example, has investigated early Islamic writing and imagining of cities that contends with negotiating multiple sources, sacred and empirical, to write cities such as Mecca, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Cairo. This work attends to contradictions, as well as compromises, that were necessary when drawing on cosmological and religious texts as well as political calculations to write chronicles of major cities of religious and political symbolism around the 9th to 11th centuries. More contemporarily, Janet Abu-Lughod (1987) has helped in deconstructing the discourse of the ‘Islamic City’ as an orientalist myth relying on limited reference cases by addressing the contextual influences of Islam on urban form (through territoriality, architecture, and laws organising property rights). Additionally, Zeynep Çelik (1999) attends to cities of the Muslim world by critiquing the ‘Islamic city’ thesis, but also through frames of the colonial city, and historical negotiations of modernism and modernisation (19th–20th centuries). Emerging here is an already long trajectory of scholarship that pre-dates the current fascination with oil-urbanism in the Gulf, or terrorism and counterterrorism. This work attends to colonial urban formations, critiques of orientalism, and situates cities in the Muslim world within the global currents of modernity, colonialism, and capitalism. These intellectual traditions have anticipated the ongoing debates around architectural experimentation as well as contestations around heritage and urban identity (Andraos et al., 2016; Bsheer, 2020).

Crucially, for a decolonial agenda that draws on Muslim geographies and seeks to put it in conversation with current decolonial thinking and Black thought, it is perhaps worth recalling the intertwining of Islam and urbanism in anticolonial struggles. While a strong strand of decolonial thinking relies on work from Latin America, another strand of decolonial thought and blackness also relies on the work of Frantz Fanon. Spatial commentaries in Fanon's The Wretched of Earth (2004 [1961]) serve as a foundational anticolonial and decolonial text as well as a commentary on colonial and anticolonial urban geographies that explicitly engages with Islam, thereby already bridging the two conversions of decolonial thinking and Muslim specialities (see Davis 2022 on the forgetting of Fanon's Algeria). Arising from this work already are new forms of thinking about the urban inspired by Muslim everyday lives and experiences, ones that are entangled, and on the move (Simone, 2020).

Conclusion

While these themes are not exhaustive, I use them to echo the questions raised in Sidaway's paper, and to gesture towards some of the ways we could generatively build on his invitations while acknowledging that these intellectual traditions are complex and contextual. To return to my introduction to this piece, I would also like to push this engagement by troubling the starting point for the dismissal of Muslim geographies. In other words, I ask why we should pass by Bowman and Lefebvre as starting points. Starting with them articulates, of course, that some of the main influential (male) geographers dismissed Muslim Geographies or held orientalist views about Islam. This puts non-western knowledge in marginal positions, as a response to misrepresentations, or to echo the late Azeezat Johnson (2020), as others inhabiting a background of normative whiteness in Geography, rather than traditions existing in their own right. While the search for non-western epistemologies has been a radical development in geography and cognate disciplines, building on work and activism of scholars and students of colour, my worry is that the repeated moves to look into ‘alternative’ epistemologies as a redemptive solution to the whiteness of a Euro-American tradition, is precisely that: a solution to a Eurocentric problem. The risk might be that we reduce their complexities and internal tensions. I suggest that there are implications to what kind of decolonial work we imagine Islam to be doing when we critically attend to our starting points for decolonialisation. Decentring the whiteness of the discipline as the starting point allows for an engagement with Islamic traditions of geography on their own terms, as complex, evolving, contextual, and at times perhaps problematic, rather than as a redemptive answer to a specific Eurocentric question.