In this paper I seek to bring to the fore the theological sources of everyday resistance in the Islamicate, focusing specifically on emancipatory detachment. In doing so, I think with anti-colonial theories of relationality and strategies of refusal, both generatively and critically. While the scholarship and advocacy for relationality from indigenous, feminist, and cosmopolitan traditions are important and carry obvious merits, the concept in practice can also have an oppressive function in the form of colonial relationality. Colonial relationality imposes or reinforces racial hierarchies, unequal power dynamics, and feelings and behaviours of superiority and inferiority. This enforced colonial entanglement and proximity is expressed via direct territorial annexation, destruction of life, economic dependency, and epistemic domination and erasures. While all these forms of colonial relationality, and in turn the corresponding forms of resistance and liberation, are visible and measurable, the internal mental forms are not. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have been instrumental in advancing the consideration and theorising of interiority in IR, notably via the emotional turn, via psychoanalytical approaches, and by interrogating the objective-subjective binary; building on this scholarship, I consider what further perspectives can be gleaned from what has been termed ‘political theology’. Indeed, what sources of moral power fundamental to psychological resistance and liberation, especially for the oppressed, are bypassed because they do not fit within a secular intellectual episteme? It is this realm of interiority, via the lens of Islamic concepts, that I will focus on in this article.

Speaker:

Dr Jasmine K. Gani is Assistant Professor of International Relations Theory at the London School of Economics and Politics Science. She writes and teaches on (anti)colonialism, knowledge production, theory and history of International Relations, and the Middle East. Her work on the Middle East focuses particularly on Israel-Palestine, Syria, Egypt, the role of western powers, ideologies and social movements, and anti-colonial solidarities. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, and Millennium, among others; and she has authored and co-edited books on anti-colonialism, the politics of the Middle East, and the Syrian conflict.